"Frankie's Place: A Love Story," by Jim Sterba. I have read Jim Sterba's occasional pieces in the Wall St. Journal for many years, and always really liked them. This book got great reviews in all the usual places, so I bought it. It's a kind of love story/memoir of Sterba's relationship with Frances FitzGerald, author of "Fire in the Lake" and many other superb books. Sterba met her in passing and they gradually fell in love and started spending time together at her family retreat on Mount Desert Island, Maine. First a weekend, then a week, then weeks, then summers, they finally moved there permanently and married.

I don't recommend the book, because it's kind of tedious reading. I can always tell when a book is no good, because it sits for days between sessions with it. This one lay untouched for a week before I bit the bullet yesterday and finished it. Another thing: it is replete with mistakes, of spelling, grammar, syntax, and the rest: I find this shocking, since I am certain both these excellent writers read the proofs with a gimlet eye, as well as their editor. How can this be? An example: on page 120 appears the following sentence: "Brake fluid spewed out over the engine each time the brake peddle was pushed." I mean, my last book, proofed only by me, has only 1 error, and that so subtle that only a specialist noted it. I have nothing to hide: the mistake is on page 81, where I spelled Rem Koolhaas' name "Koolhas."

Other than their love for writing, Sterba and FitzGerald are as different as chalk and cheese. Sterba is from Michigan, an orphan who grew up on a struggling farm in Michigan; FitzGerald is a descendant of Mayflower pilgrims, from two Boston Brahmin families that go all the way back. She went to private schools, Harvard, the whole elite kielbasa. Yet the two of them meshed. As they say in Jamaica, "There's a lid for every pot." From the book:

On the Fitzgerald family decamping as a group from their compound: "This family is like a supertanker: the captain has to issue an order for a turn half an hour before the turn actually begins."

On the Old Money of the Fitzgerald family:"Between 1861 and 1897, the number of millionaires in the United States went from three to thirty-eight hundred."

On hunting mushrooms on the island: "The mushrooms we found were labeled in the guide 'edibility not known.' The trick is figuring out which are edible and delicious, and which are poisonous and deadly. Actually, it is more of an adventure than a trick, an exploration into the realm of unknowns and uncertainties in which self-confidence and doubt wage war in one's mind. Our friend Calvin Trillin, the writer and eater, says his warning bell rings when he hears or reads the phrase 'central nervous system'." [My comment: these people are crazy. "If in doubt, throw it out" is the mantra of the mushroom hunter. As they say, there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.]