We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desperate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk.

—Henry David Thoreau, in Walking

In his journal entry for April 26, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a pleasant afternoon walk with Thoreau and, later that night, a lesson learned:

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau. Warm, pleasant, misty weather, which the great mountain amphitheatre seemed to drink in with gladness. A crow’s voice filled all the miles of air with sound. A bird’s voice, even a piping frog, enlivens a solitude and makes world enough for us. At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say, Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience. Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara.

The two men were new friends at this point, and journal entries by both reflect their enthusiasm for shared company — though Emerson may have enjoyed tramping with Thoreau more than Thoreau enjoyed tea with Emerson. In a journal entry for April 26, 1841, occasioned by a visit to Emerson’s Concord home, Thoreau expresses this discomfort with the abodes of “civilized man”:

His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.

It is a great art to saunter.

In his eulogy for Thoreau twenty years later, Emerson recalled how “it was a pleasure and privilege to walk with him,” though he would “as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Thoreau would not have objected to the comparison, says Richard Higgins in Thoreau and the Language of Trees:

Human nature appeared slightly bent to Thoreau, but he saw trees as upright and virtuous, the nobility of the vegetable kingdom. Their stance spoke of the “ancient rectitude and vigor of nature.” Nothing, he said, stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree.

Although he cites not Thoreau but Walt Whitman as his guide, few have taken the saunter imperative more to heart than Andrew Forsthoefel, whose Walking to Listen describes his eleven-month hike from Pennsylvania to California. With the listening at least as important as the walking, Forsthoefel collected eighty-five hours of taped interviews, as well as detailed notes on his many casual encounters; he also kept himself attuned to the stranger within — “the fact that I was a living mystery, and so were all of the neighbors I’d never met”:

I’d wanted to live this kind of story for as long as I could remember, a story in which a traveler casts off into the big unknown with nothing more than a loaded pack, and meets strangers on the road, and breaks bread with those strangers, learning the unique language of their lives before casting off into the big unknown again. It was an ancient kind of human experience, that of the pilgrim, the wayfarer, but as an American Millennial and a son of suburbia, it felt like a lost inheritance.

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Twenty-five years ago — and twenty-six novels ago — Donna Leon, who grew up in New Jersey, stumbled upon her life’s work in Venice. “I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends,” Leon told me in a 2009 interview, “and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation and we started talking about how to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book. It took about a year, and after it was finished it sat in a drawer because I’ve never really had any ambition. I was always pretty shiftless in my life. But I entered Death at La Fenice in a contest, it won, I got a contract for two books, then two more and so it went.” Decades later, a shiftless Leon is hard to imagine. Aside from writing a novel a year, she has a doctorate in eighteenth-century literature and a passion for Baroque opera, with which she is involved as a writer and a company director. To her readers, of course, she is above all the creator of Commisario Guido Brunetti, the complex and empathetic Venetian investigator who remains the fulcrum of her series.

Brunetti first appeared in Death at La Fenice, where his presence seems slight — perhaps because the plot is one of Leon’s busiest. An obnoxious conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, is found poisoned to death, and the subsequent drama unfolds with operatic brio. There is a tempestuous soprano, a vengeful wife, a horribly wronged mistress, plenty of nasty (as well as Nazi) secrets, and lots of good old comeuppance. Yet no player is a caricature and no plot twist is excessive. Leon’s psychological acuity, sly wit, and artistic restraint both deepen and darken a novel that is, like all enduring crime fiction, a study of character as much as crime. And though the titles of Leon’s three subsequent novels — Death in a Strange Country, Dressed for Death, and Death and Judgment — suggested a series that would proceed with mechanical predictability, the opposite has been true. Almost without exception, each installment in the Brunetti series is substantial and self-sufficient. For within the city of Venice and with a familiar cast of characters — Brunetti’s wife, Paola, and her aristocratic family, his friend and colleague Vianello, his insufferable boss, Patta, and the incomparable Signorina Elettra — Leon constructs elegant dramas around dense matters such as political, military or Vatican corruption, the victimization of immigrants, organized crime, environmental crime, and even New Age hucksterism.

The action begins, invariably, with a body. “He latched his fingers around the strands and pulled gently . . . As he backed up one step it floated closer, and the silk spread out and wrapped itself around his wrist.” This is Brunetti in The Girl of His Dreams, pulling a dead Roma child out of a canal. And here he is in Leon’s new novel, Earthly Remains:  “At first, Brunetti looked to one side of the rope, then steeled himself and looked at it and what was below: the top of a head, a shoulder, the other, and then the chest of the man . . . bobbing and turning in the water.” The drowned man, David Casati, is an elderly widower, beekeeper, and fisherman who knew Brunetti’s father. Casati is also the caretaker of the villa where Brunetti recuperates following an incident during an interrogation that makes him question his judgment and feel his age. “I can’t stand it any longer, doing what I do,” he confesses to his wife. Later, a doctor identifies Brunetti’s ailment as “Your work. The need to do something when you can do nothing.”

The physician could be addressing Henning Mankell‘s detective Kurt Wallender or, closer to home, Michael Dibdin‘s Venetian investigator Aurelio Zen. After all, what fictional detective does not despair? Certainly Brunetti, like his native city, is repeatedly engulfed: by sadness, by humanity. And never more so than in Earthly Remains, which briefly transports him to an idyllic island (“Brunetti awoke in Paradise”) with Pliny to read and with Casati as his guide on the water. But even paradise is not what it used to be.

“Everywhere, we’ve built and dug and torn up,” Casati rages. ” We’ve poisoned it all, killed it all.” His bees are dying. Soon he is dead, perhaps murdered. And Brunetti is back in harness, but for how much longer? Earthly Remains, for all its murkiness and skullduggery, is the most elegiac of Leon’s novels; it feels like a farewell. In one scene, for example, Brunetti, Vianello, and Casati’s bereaved daughter sit “in silence for a moment, three Venetians, relatives at the wake of a city that had been an empire and was now selling off the coffee spoons to pay the heating bill.” Maybe so, but Leon will always bring this city back to life.

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In his fifth novel, Hari Kunzru confronts America’s racially stained history through an ingenious premise: the eerie appearance of a 1920s blues song in contemporary New York, where two young white men obsessed with black music persuade themselves that they’ve made the record.

It’s a sly setup for a book that takes on the controversial topic of cultural appropriation, whereby the ethnic majority adopts or even attempts to co-opt the cultural elements of an ethnic minority. The meaning of the term referenced in the title White Tears is elastic, but in essence it describes the propensity of some white people (even, and perhaps especially, those who regard themselves as enlightened) to focus on their own feelings and responses in issues involving race, instead of acknowledging their privileged position.

In the case of the two twentysomething Brooklyn hipsters in Kunzru’s novel, connoisseurship of the blues is a ticket to a kind of personal cachet that neither feels in possession of on his own. Seth, socially awkward and still recovering from a vaguely described nervous breakdown after the death of his mother, worries that he’s a parasitic presence in the life of his buddy Carter, heir to a fortune his family has built on their private prisons and security business.

Carter himself is uncomfortable with the privilege that his wealth conveys. He doesn’t like to discuss money at all, though he’s happy to use it to finance his and Seth’s budding music business and to pursue a passion for collecting old blues records. “He listened exclusively to black music because, he said, it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people. He spoke as if ‘white people’ were the name of an army or a gang, some organization to which he didn’t belong.”

Seth, a devoted audiophile, takes long walks through the city, during which he makes surreptitious recordings. One day, Seth records a man in a park singing a haunting blues song, and Carter urges him to create a “recording,” with crackles and hisses to make it sound old. Carter posts the resulting file online as a period recording by a singer whom he dubs Charlie Shaw, and collectors clamor to buy it. One in particular, with the handle JumpJim, insists that the man and the record really existed.

Carter celebrates this bizarre development as the ultimate imprimatur of authenticity: “These fuckers think this music was made in 1928, but actually we made it. We made it, fools! We made that shit last week! So who’s the expert now? Who knows the tradition? We do! We own that shit!” Carter hopes to parlay the interest in the fake Charlie Shaw record into the purchase of other rare records from the mysterious JumpJim. Unfortunately, a disaster soon sidelines Carter — by far the more interesting of the duo. Seth and Carter’s sister, a troubled artist on whom Seth has a hopeless crush, are thrown together as they attempt to solve the ghostly historical mystery surrounding the record and how it may be entwined with Carter’s fate.

As he’s done in some of his other novels, notably his rightly acclaimed Gods Without Men, Kunzru begins hopscotching through time and geography. He takes his characters and his readers on not one but two road trips through the American South and leaves his narrator, Seth, for firsthand accounts of JumpJim and, finally, the half-figmentary Charlie Shaw himself.

The trouble is that our primary guide through the kudzu of history that White Tears creates is Seth, a young man afflicted with self-loathing and social anxiety, the kind of storyteller who has to resort to college-essay tactics to tackle a big subject:

When did I lose touch with the future? I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting . . . Now I would say the future is behind me. It is, in any case, out of my reach. It would be easy to put the blame on Carter, on his melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss, but I bear my share of responsibility. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos” — homecoming — and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.

Seth is so listless that he excites only a cerebral pity. He remains a cipher, dispossessed from the business he and Carter built by Carter’s parents and older brother, and barely tolerated by Carter’s sister. After a cameo by his father, his own family doesn’t figure at all in the story. Seth says early on that he “made a run for it, away from human history and its dark places,” and he’s as good as his word. He has no context and spends a lot of the book adrift, seemingly so he can be a fly on the wall for Kunzru’s project. Eventually, this function is literalized: He’s simply a tool.

The character of Charlie Shaw isn’t fully embodied either, though for different reasons. His short, shattered life seems like a carapace in which to fit the reflexive lock-him-up racism of a local policeman, the rages of a prison chain gang overseer, and the casual appropriation by record companies whose representatives traveled the South panning for musical gold but leaving the musicians themselves behind.

JumpJim is the most fully realized of Kunzru’s narrators, though he gets a fraction of the airtime Seth does. The sections in which JumpJim describes his youthful road trip through the South in the 1950s with a veteran record collector and heroin addict named Chester Bly are among the book’s most engaging. In one memorable scene, a patrolman in a small southern town stops the car in which they are traveling as they seek out rare records. Wary that they may be civil rights agitators, the trooper makes a veiled threat. Chester responds that he’s a “proud American. I stand with the white man, one hundred percent.”

Afterward, JumpJim reflects on the exchange: “I don’t think Chester meant a word of it. No one could have loved that music so much and harbored a speck of racial prejudice. All the same I felt ashamed. It seemed wrong to have said what he said. For a moment I wished I really had driven along those bumpy roads to register people to vote, to tell them they ought to be free.” This conflict is the dark heart of the book, but it seldom emerges with clarity in Seth’s meandering narration.

Cultural appropriation is a natural subject for Kunzru, who’s displayed an intense curiosity about an astonishingly diverse cast of characters, from the half-Indian, half-English protagonist of his debut novel, The Impressionist, to the lonely Indian computer coder in Silicon Valley in Transmission, to the middle-aged onetime English radical in My Revolutions, to the chorus of characters — nineteenth-century silver miners and ethnographers of native Americans, 1970s UFO cult members, Iraqi emigrants, a disconsolate British rock star, the parents of an autistic boy who goes missing in the desert — whose narratives together form his kaleidoscopic last novel, Gods Without Men.

Unfortunately, the characters in White Tears are missing the blood and heart that would bring this important story to life. There’s a painstaking quality to the novel that’s reminiscent of Carter and Seth’s studious reproduction of that old record. An agenda of condemnation appears to have overtaken the curiosity that has allowed Kunzru to imaginatively inhabit so many different people. In arraying himself against his book’s appropriators, racists, wealthy elites, and corporate opportunists, he has transmuted his considerable literary gifts into a weapon that seeks out its targets, again and again.

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Dense biographies about high-wattage Hollywood stars with limited acting chops can be tricky business for a writer and a reader alike. The former has to instill in the latter a belief in why we should care beyond yet another exegesis of celebrity, while readers, ideally, find a way to open themselves to seeing old works anew.

Marc Eliot has this kind of challenge in hand with Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon — a voluminous, and possibly definitive, study one of the big screen’s paragons of brawn and masculinity. Its subject looms large in our cultural memory while remaining a limited thespian whose go-to move was leaning forward, iron jaw extended, as if forever contemplating where to get a good steak.

But if Heston lacked range, he didn’t lack self-consciousness. He was an ardent diarist, and those writings are counted on to provide new vantage points, Heston’s prose teaming up with Eliot’s, as it were, in a joint mission to tell us why we should care more than we already do about this Tinsel Town icon.

For starters, we should care because of the people Heston worked with, and what his relationship with them reveals. Consider, for example, Orson Welles, with whom Heston paired in 1957 to film the still incredibly odd, incredibly creepy B-noir Touch of Evil. Throughout this book we see Heston launching himself into intense workouts to get in shape for his parts, like he’s training for some epic last-man-standing competition, with lots of tennis worked in. He often comes off as a pawn for cagey directors but a thinking pawn all the same, with a sensitive B.S. detector making up the deficiencies of top-shelf mental acumen. In college he screened and loved Citizen Kane, and it was Heston who got Welles the directing gig for Touch of Evil, when no one in Hollywood would so much as prod Welles’s corpulent midsection with a barge pole.

Like so many Welles projects before it, Touch of Evil was hamstrung by what producers considered over-artiness, with Heston quite rightly realizing that he was a pretend star — behind Welles — in a picture that was only being made because he could draw an audience. Heston found himself having to act as go-between for the studio with an increasingly disconsolate director, who believed his leading man was a turncoat in part responsible for shearing his vision from him.

But outings like this one were the exceptions, of course. Heston was an action man, and Eliot’s book is structured around the monuments of his stardom: films like The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Planet of the Apes. It’s a list that not only defines Heston’s career but a considerable chunk of what is still well remembered from Hollywood in the late 1950s and 1960s. If you’ve seen any film in your life outside of a Netflix-and-chill context in the most perfunctory film class — or hell, if you just ever leave the TV on at Easter — you’ve assuredly seen at least one of them. And if you’ve not seen Planet of the Apes, you’ve seen its ending spoofed somewhere. Heston’s physicality and the toll taken by the Ben-Hur shooting were integral, we see, to his performance. Worn down, almost like he’d been rubbed into the nitrate itself, Heston cries real tears as his character watches the Christ figure die in the film’s final shot. You watch the performance and you’re surprised, perhaps, how truly this stoic figure is emoting, with some context now worked in to flesh out one’s understanding of a scene. Ben-Hur becomes even more human a picture, and there even seems to be something preternatural about the fact that Heston performed all but two parts of the epic chariot race.

Eliot’s portrait of Heston’s life does take some turns off the set, and we catch glimpses of a fascinating political figure, so far as actors go, one considerably more protean than we now think — teaming with Martin Luther King, Jr. one moment and regularly stumping for the NRA the next. (In fact, Heston’s positions on guns are more nuanced than the anti-firearm brigade would likely expect.) But Eliot’s clear preference is the world of film, putting us right there with Heston as he mulls scripts, trains, launches himself bodily and mentally — both so far as each aspect of him went — into epics, biopics, big pictures, small pictures, more or less equally.

Heston is at its best here, revealing its subject as downright ruminative while working on The Ten Commandments, having prepped to the hilt to ready himself to play Moses. You even get the sense of some bonding/twining across the ages going on between the Red Sea parter and the Hollywood hunk: “All the Mosaic literature I’m working through, all the times I’ve read the script, mean little compared to the weeks I’ve spent wearing Moses’ clothes and breathing the air he knew.” A post-shooting bath prompts a joke about trying to part the water in the tub. You don’t expect sly wit from Heston. But when you see it on view in these pages, you realize how his performances gained in power from that push-and-pull between what was emoted and what was held back — which fosters a unique actorly visual all its own. After all, a biographer could always provide a more fulsomely emotional display — almost like production notes for a life and career — and now one has.

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