BRIEFLY NOTED.

Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23). Cusk's sixth novel portrays the lives of contemporary middle- and upper-middle-class English mothers living in a placid, prestigious London suburb "where women drank coffee all day and pushed prams around the grey, orderly streets." Its residents include a successful recruiter turned obsessive homemaker, a woman who married up and feels the constant "presence of the enormous darkness from which she had come," and a frustrated city transplant who blames her parents for her aimlessness and tells her daughters that they are ruining her life. Unfortunately, Cusk can't decide whether she wants to satirize these women or swaddle them in viscous, Woolfian prose, for which she has a definite talent. Though the novel contains many striking descriptions, the tone is often shrill, and the characters are too transparent to be sympathetic.

Everything Preserved, by Landis Everson (Graywolf; $15). This remarkable debut collection has an unusual silence at its heart. The first nine poems were written between 1955 and 1960, when Everson was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance; after that, he gave up writing poetry. The sixty-six others were written in a late outpouring from 2003 to 2005. Confident that "time loves the unity of our separate bones," the poems are purposeful and unpredictable. "Sacrifice" ends with a list of questions. No. 7: "Would you sign your name to this poem?" The earlier poems, in which filigree images decorate tense, often melancholy content, perhaps go some way toward explaining the long hiatus. These are poems of a talented but anxious youth who ultimately chooses to arm himself with silence--"I don't like people knowing what I'm thinking."

George Gershwin, by Howard Pollack (California; $39.95). Pollack's compendious though sometimes leaden biography comprises two sections, "Life" ...