Family Albums By SUSANN COKAL

LEAVING ROCK HARBOR

By Rebecca Chace

292 pp. Scribner. $25.

THE HOUSE ON SALT HAY ROAD

By Carin Clevidence

285 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Long ago and far away, Aristotle called poetry (by which he meant imaginative writing in general) “a more philosophical and serious business than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.” He was describing the difference between the events we know to have happened to such-and-such a person on such-and-such a date and the wide scope of human reactions to those events. And, by extension, of the way imaginative writing can grab at our hearts to make history live beyond the limits of facts.

The best historical novels recreate the past as a series of intimate interactions and reflections punctuated by the wars, economic booms and busts, and acts of God that are readily checked by scholars. Recently, Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”; Colm Toibin’s “Brooklyn”; and “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett, have, in their very different ways, brought history home, and without the gimmicks of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Now Rebecca Chace and Carin Clevidence are exploring the intersection of self with history in the first half of the 20th century, in “Leaving Rock Harbor” and “The House on Salt Hay Road.” Both novels are moody, with ominous beginnings and plucky protagonists who struggle for happiness despite the intrusion of outside forces. And both succeed as forays into small lives buffeted by great events.

Chace, the author of a previous novel, “Capture the Flag,” and a memoir, “Chautauqua Summer,” opens “Leaving Rock Harbor” on a note of despair. It is 1916, and Frankie Ross’s father has attempted suicide, prompting his family’s hasty relocation from upstate New York to the prosperous city of Rock Harbor, Mass. While her father readily finds work in a cotton mill, the fresh start is difficult for 15-year-old Frankie, who narrates the novel (sometimes distractingly) from the perspective of grown womanhood. Lonely and stifled, she’s relieved to attract the attention of the wealthy Winslow Curtis, son of a conservative (and prurient) politician, and his friend Joe Barros, a Portuguese millworker who is also the star of the high school basketball team. In “Jules and Jim” fashion, these three share picnics and scantily clad swims. But when Frankie talks the boys into giving her a tour of the Curtis mill, the visit ends in disaster: through Frankie’s carelessness, a young girl is pulled into a loom, mangling one of her feet.

“There are such nights,” Frankie reflects, “when everything changes either by accident or intention.” Nobody, she adds, “actually chooses how they behave at a time like that.” At first, Frankie makes few choices, and the accident has scant consequences. She and Winslow and Joe have fun until World War I plucks Joe away to Europe — and Frankie quickly abandons both corset and chastity to Winslow, who soon becomes her husband. But the image of that little millworker, mouth open in a scream drowned out by the machinery, haunts the rest of the novel, especially since the victim will make her adult presence felt at pivotal moments.

Chace’s novel shows earnest ambition as it addresses the history of the labor movement and factory reform in the years after the war. As the Massachusetts cotton industry lags, beleaguered workers protest pay cuts and factory conditions, and Frankie’s father finds his calling in agitating for their cause. As Winslow Curtis’s wife, Frankie is, naturally, placed in a difficult position, but Chace’s social conscience seems stronger than her narrator’s. Frankie may help her father in small ways, but she remains unengaged in the larger political struggles, eager to shrug off her responsibilities and her painful memories. The novel’s descriptions of the mill are painstakingly thorough, and exposition intrudes into the dialogue as Chace’s characters inform one another (and us) of what’s happening in the wider world. Frankie is predominantly invested in her love life — for Joe, wounded in the war but no less alluring, has returned to become a labor organizer, still unmarried and still in love with his childhood friend. Cue fireworks and sticky situations.

The fireworks in Carin Clevidence’s first novel, “The House on Salt Hay Road” come early, but the novel keeps a steady flame burning until its final scenes. When an explosion in a fireworks factory rattles a Depression-era Long Island coastal community, 12-year-old Clayton Poole sets out on a panicked search to find his older sister, Nancy. The orphaned siblings are the central figures in a narrative that will be shaped by mourning and rescue. These two are deeply attached to each other, to the exclusion of their late mother’s father, brother and sister, who have welcomed them to the now crowded house on Salt Hay Road.

On the day of the explosion, Nancy is distracted by a young museum curator from Boston, visiting the mansion where her aunt works as a cook. Their subsequent love affair, which Nancy is determined to bring to the altar (via the bedroom if necessary), disrupts the household’s uneasy equilibrium. Clayton, for one, is devastated when Nancy announces her engagement. Taking refuge in the outdoors, he sketches dead animals, trying, his sister notes, “to understand the meaning of . . . loss by studying the mechanics of decay.”

Clevidence’s Long Island is a lushly described place of wild marshes, shallow bays and beckoning beaches. The people who live here hunt, fish and sail not for amusement but as a way of life that brings its own hardy pleasures. There may be a bit too much local color for some readers’ tastes, but the eccentric characters we expect of a small town are evoked with a reverence that lifts them from the precious to the pageworthy. On a warm day, pet cockatoos roost in a tree outside a bird fancier’s house. Clayton’s crusty grandfather plays cribbage while telling tales of his former career rescuing shipwreck victims. Still grieving over a lost love, Uncle Roy begins a new courtship while his sister, Mavis, bakes with Depression-defying abundance and tries to bring religion and superstition to an understanding of her own failed marriage.

Driven gently by these tensions, and a few Nancy discovers in her own impetuous romance, the story creeps toward disaster, which arrives with the great hurricane of 1938. Again family members are separated as the storm demolishes homes and rearranges the landscape. Who will rescue whom? Are the family members defined by their responses to crises like the hurricane or by the small moments that make up most of their lives? The answers are wrenching, melancholy — and yet, for some, surprisingly hopeful.

Clevidence has a gift for creating images that express the unspeakable. When Clayton walks along the beach just before the storm, he notices orange-and-black butterflies trying to fly while “mixed with the salt spray.” Then “tumbling over the sand were bright scraps of butterflies that had been ripped apart in the wind.” A storyteller with this fine an eye might put more trust her own powers and avoid plot-based fireworks. Clevidence’s invented emotional lives convey truths that lurk below the surface of historical events, truths that, like those butterflies, bring pleasure even as they remind us how easily they can be torn to bits.

Susann Cokal, the author of the novels “Mirabilis” and “Breath and Bones,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Cokal-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print