Early passages in Paul Griner's debut novel achieve that luminous empathy for damaged humanity that one finds in the best writing of Fitzgerald: There is the same stalwart, thrilling prose-rhythm, which nonetheless takes pause here and there to loom like an aching angel over the objects of psychic alienation -- to luxuriate in the plush contours of doomed romance. The book's first half is full of exquisitely honed observations buoyed by a tidal swell of sexualized foreboding; depth of characterization is given ballast by a wonderful integrity of intimate symbolism; and the excited reader is simultaneously appalled and enthralled by a woman's ineluctable drift into oceanic trouble.

What's the trouble? The lovely, lonely, intelligent protagonist falls under the spell of a dark, mysterious, slightly sadistic gentleman... who just so happens to own a sailboat. Uh oh. They go sailing. Uh oh. But because Griner's writing is so good, the reader allows this erotic sailor his predictably phallocentric rigging -- also, the violent breeze billowing his mainsail -- at least until the tight metaphors and keen insights get pitched overboard to lighten the narrative cargo. And suddenly, The Collectors is just another rickety junk boat foundering in the neap tide of some waterlogged cinematic formula: Looking for Mr. Goodbar on the poop deck. RICK LEVIN

OVER THE LIP OF THE WORLD: AMONG THE STORYTELLERS OF MADAGASCAR by Colleen J. McElroy
(University of Washington Press) $24.95

The world's fourth biggest island may be, as the cliché has it, "The Land That Time Forgot," but sheer charm seems to have remembered it quite well, thank you. Here is where explorers claimed to have found the giant eggs of the roc, the mythical elephant bird; suited office workers stroll tranquilly through flooded rice fields; and diviners lead parades around ancestral graves.

Madagascar is best known stateside for lemurs and the haunting valiha music of Rossy, but UW prof and poet McElroy went there to sample the unique brew of Malagasy storytelling. Settled by traders and pirates from Malaysia, Polynesia, Arabia, India, and Africa, the island's nine million inhabitants have conjured up almost as many eye-popping stories. Doomed lovers casting themselves into a lake are small beer next to the woman giving birth to a talking squash, quarreling spouses hunting for Aladdinesque riches in a vast cave, and a beast changeling transformed into a hunk before wooing belles. The Malagasy belief that havoc happens when a trickster finds a voice is the only thing that keeps me from relating the antics of Ikely Mahitisy, the invisible boy, and Just Head, who is just that.

Whether chatting with renowned poets or sweating out encounters with hissing cockroaches, McElroy is a most amiable companion. Linguists will find much fascinating material in her introductory chapter on the island's 18 dialects, but the rest of us will be impatient to climb aboard an overcrowded jitney, bound for yet another balladeer softly murmuring of ancient doings. KENT MILLER

THE BEST AMERICAN MOVIE WRITING 1999 edited by Peter Bogdanovich, series editor Jason Shinder
(St. Martin's Griffin) $14.95

This is a depressing collection, a series that rambles on and on about how much better movies used to be -- which was precisely Peter Bogdanovich's intent; his introduction brags of "push[ing] to bring in as much retrospectively minded material as possible," to combat the "lack of attention paid to what has preceded us." Certainly a sense of history is essential, and I'd even agree that in their current state movies could be considered in crisis (too expensive, too sensationalistic, too just plain dumb).

Nostalgia, though, is never the right response to a crisis. Who really benefits from reading Terrence Rafferty's wistful longing for glamour to return to women's pictures, John Brodie's hagiography of two filmmakers (Frankenheimer and Boorman) much better served by warts-and-all assessments, or David Denby's old-codger harrumphing that everything about the movies has gone to hell except, thank heavens, the perspicacity of film critics? In this vein, Roger Ebert's glib reviews of "Nine Great Movies" are at least honestly set forth as recommendations for video rentals.

There are better ways of dealing with the past than just longing for it. Robin Wood offers another provocative reading of a generally dismissed film (Leo McCarey's Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!), Robert Horton's salute to "Frank Sinatra, Actor" is perceptive, and Molly Haskell offers more thoughts about where the women's movie is heading than Rafferty could imagine. Ultimately, though, in making his selections Bogdanovich should have remembered better a line from a piece he did choose, by his old friend Andrew Sarris: "With the past having become infinitely more promising than the future, there is a tendency to suspend all judgments about old movies.... [To do so] is both mistaken and short-sighted." BRUCE REID