"It is easy for a life to become unblessed." The opening line of Cherry Valley writer Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document is a kind of verbal shrug. Although the line refers to the novel's main character, Mary Whittaker, a '60s radical who stays on the lam from 1972 well into the '90s, it also lets the reader know that Mary's story won't be told with blind idealism.

Spiotta's 2001 debut novel, Lightning Field, won her critical acclaim and comparisons to Don DeLillo. Eat the Document—titled after the legendary unreleased documentary about Bob Dylan—is the story of how Mary and her true love, radical filmmaker Bobby DeSoto, became lost to each other and themselves. It's also an examination of contemporary culture at unnervingly close range—a long, edgy riff on the personal nature of political activism, and a collection of portraits of a veritable tribe of restless, dissatisfied folks who have looked askance at America from their communes and computer screens over the past 30 years.

We meet Mary in the eerie aftermath of a Vietnam protest that went horribly wrong. Having left Bobby at Grand Central Station, she's crossed five state lines, holed up in a cheap motel, and dyed her hair; now she's just got to figure out who to become. In tension-filled, elegant prose, Spiotta portrays Mary staring at "her whole life, the sum of her past twenty-two years and the path into her future" contained in a pile on the chenille bedspread: "clothes and supplies, $400, a box of L'Oreal Ash, some scissors, and a notebook" that she can write in only if she immediately rips up and discards the pages.

It is several chapters before Spiotta reveals the full story of what Mary and Bobby did. Meanwhile, the reader senses Mary's growing dread as she realizes that going underground is not the romantic adventure she and Bobby once pictured. Suddenly, she can never call her difficult mother, must discard favorite habits such as drinking coffee, and has to "count on bad luck." No wonder she decides to become plain old Caroline Sherman, rather than Bobby's suggestion, "Freya from the edge."

Caroline crisscrosses the country, narrowly avoiding discovery, and eventually winds up living in the Pacific Northwest as Louise Barrot, a name taken from a dead infant. Louise is the single mother of Jason, a Beach Boys-loving, awkward, distant computer geek who's hellbent on discovering his mom's backstory. Louise stumbles through a life writ small by teaching cooking classes at the local community center and developing a nightly dependence on white wine spritzers.

Meanwhile, Bobby reinvents himself as Nash, manager of Prairie Fire, a leftist bookstore and networking center that's frequented by ambitious cyber-activists. Nash turns for questionable comfort to Miranda, a twentysomething smartass who may or may not be leaving her hacker-turned-corporate-Web-engineer boyfriend. Nash also develops a tender friendship with Prairie Fire's owner Henry, who, despite his age and mysterious symptoms of Agent Orange exposure, still takes to defacing billboards at night.

Simultaneously—and without knowing they're in each other's vicinity—Louise and Nash grow more and more disheartened as activism turns into a career path rather than a calling, and the world grows increasingly troubled and in need of ideals. As those close to Louise and Nash move closer to discovering their true identities, Mary and Bobby reemerge, meet once again, and edge toward being found.

In the end, Eat the Document is one unsentimental, meticulously researched, richly detailed, lyrical walk through the gray area that lies between the personal and the political, and along that ever so fine line that divides idealism and cynicism. It's a mesmerizing page-turner with much to say about the nature of identity in a culture based on starting over, and what individuals and groups can do to save the world—or not. If this weren't 2006 and if I had less respect for its author, I'd say, "Steal this book!"

We meet Bill Schoenberg as he drives north through New York State, experiencing not a sweet peace but a deepening sense of dread and loathing as the bright lights thin out and the foliage thickens. Tossed out by his wife, he has chosen to cut himself off from all that's familiar and dive into what he considers purgatory: the wildlands north of the George Washington Bridge.

An investment banker, Schoenberg is an unlikely candidate for country life. "When it came to greenery, I preferred mine creamed and served beside an $80 steak at Peter Luger. Men like me drew the snickers of trees." Buying a country house had been the wife's idea in the first place; on arrival, he finds himself literally afraid to get out of his BMW.

Living on snacks from the gas station mart and lubricating his self-pity with a constant stream of gin, the displaced New Yorker skulks around trying to figure out which of the locals might have been sleeping with his wife and convince the kid next door that she can't cut across his property. Everyone he meets seems sinister and ridiculous; one can only imagine how he appears to them. And the first time he lights a fire in his woodstove, he nearly burns the house down. In the world of investment banking, Schoenberg may have been Somebody, but in the upstate world of Harristown, he's pathetic, annoying, and veering toward dangerous.

Schoenberg's latent conscience is nudged from its sleep, however, when he begins to understand that the volunteer fire company that came to his aid needs people desperately, and finds himself attracted to the idea of actually doing something worthwhile. He's out of shape and knows nothing about fire, mechanical equipment, or anything relevant at all, but the fire department is in no position to be choosy.  Soon, Schoenberg's gin-soaked dream of misery evaporates in the face of his desire to fulfill "the shiny clanging notion, for once in my life, of saving the day."

His city-slicker ways attract a certain amount of derision, but his willingness to get involved creates a large and realistic benefit of the doubt.  The situation chosen by novelist Weinstock (As Long As She Needs Me) to drive his plot is all too real—fire companies and volunteer ambulance corps are indeed enormously hard up for manpower—and one would hope that The Golden Hour might inspire a few transplanted weekenders to seek similar redemption. Echoes of Schoenberg's flight from the city in disgrace continue to haunt him, and somebody is vandalizing his property—including that brand new BMW ("the only vehicle in the parking lot without four-wheel drive and crooked bumper stickers"). He plays Teacher's Pet in the firefighting classes, struggles with the urge to pass out cold at accident scenes, and can't help noticing when his new friends serve white wine out of red wine glasses.

Schoenberg's transformation is deftly handled, hilarious, and moving. His reflections on his failed marriage begin to give way to the embryonic rustlings of an actual life: Idly watching as the weekenders next door bustle about with caterers making ready for some A-list event, he answers the phone and accepts an invitation to dinner at a fellow fireman's house. Eventually, he helps another would-be volunteer master the academics of the training course, learns how to climb a tree, and even discovers that snow doesn't turn brown automatically.

"The golden hour" is rescue parlance for the crucial window of time during which a disaster can still be resolved without too much damage. Bill Schoenberg's own golden hour may take a few months, but it's a satisfying ride and a story of redemption that rings true.

If you live in the Hudson Valley and have come here to the Books section of your own free will, you may well be a candidate for book-geekdom.

Now, I'll try not to make too many assumptions. After all, you and I probably have just a nodding acquaintance, at best. Perhaps you were a regular at the late lamented Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz, where I was a bookseller, or you frequent the Inquiring Mind in Saugerties, the well-stocked literary haven where I've since found refuge and employment. A short questionnaire will determine your book-geekdom, or level thereof. Have you ever been caught (shamefully!) inhaling a book, your face buried in its grainy paper and musty ink, only to look up and see a smirking bookseller out of the corner of your eye? Do you feel a certain euphoria when you enter a bookstore, whether it's your favorite neighborhood shop or new, unexplored terrain with delightfully beckoning nooks, where you can be happily lost and found, alone amongst others? Have you ever marveled at the nondiscriminatory intimacy of the author-reader relationship, or wondered how many other like-minded strangers may have picked up the very book you've just chosen?

Lewis Buzbee would give an emphatic "yes!" to all of the above. A proud and uncloseted book-geek, Buzbee recounts his lifetime love affair with books in a series of short essays. Reading The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop feels like a particularly inspired dialogue with a fellow book lover, perhaps a charismatic stranger with whom you might strike up a conversation over the New Fiction table. From his first infatuation with Steinbeck in his teens (you never forget your first), to his experiences as an independent bookseller and traveling sales-rep, Buzbee became a professional book-lover. You have to be, really, to spend your life in the bookselling business. As Buzbee puts it, "Time may be money in the rest of the world, but not in the bookstore. There's little money here, so we can all take our time." This is wonderfully true. The bookstore is a refreshing resting place in our high-tech, fast-paced, profits-driven Brave New World.

Alongside his personal memoirs of a book-geek's life, Buzbee details the sketchy beginnings and history of bookselling. "In the bookstore, the individual can meet that culture, become part of a river of creation and imagination that has flowed uninterrupted for thousands of years." The first recognized library of the world—in Alexandria, Greece, founded around 300 BCE—held almost one million hand-copied papyrus scrolls (which, sadly forecasting trends to come, was burned by a conquering army to heat the city's bathhouses). Next came the bright, cacophonous marketplaces of Europe, the Far East, and Arabic nations, followed by the invention of Gutenberg's movable-type printing press, which sparked a literary explosion. Buzbee summarizes the developing culture of literacy in passionate, readable prose.

He also reveals a true talent for capturing attitude and atmosphere by painting vivid descriptions of bookstores through the ages. One shining example is Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company in Paris, a home-away-from-home for American and British Lost Generation expatriates such as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound.

As to the tenuous future of independent bookselling, amongst the unfair market advantages of big-box corporate bookstores, the Internet, and the e-book, Buzbee asserts with confidence that "eccentricity always seems to find a way." And indeed, it does. Although the demise of nearly two-thirds of all American independents since the '90s is sobering, with Ariel's closing last year standing as a painfully close-to-home example, Buzbee remains optimistic. He points out that the best independents have found creative ways around this shrinking market. Many have begun incorporating author events and other performances, along with such mercantile sidelines as coffeehouses, art galleries, art-supply stores, and even tobacco shops and bars to keep their business, and their sadly unprofitable true love, afloat. Where there's a will, there's a bookshop—and hopefully, enough secret book-sniffers to help out along the way.