DISCOVERIES

Requiem, Mass.

A Novel

John Dufresne

W.W. Norton: 316 pp., $24.95

“BIX MELVILLE’s story begins many years ago when he sat in the parlor of his second-floor apartment and tried to explain to his mother, not for the first time, that he and his sister Chloe were her children, and not, as Mom contended, shrewdly crafted replacements. They were not from another planet; they did not work for the government; they were not here spying on her.” Thus does Johnny attempt to write of his childhood in Requiem, Mass. -- his crazy mother, his charming, lying father. “Why the masquerade?” his girlfriend asks. “It’s your childhood. Call it memoir.” Johnny resists: “Just seems easier to make it fiction. . . . I’m used to lying.” And so, like many other writers, he begins the process of creation and destruction, separating fact from fiction, making it into fiction again. Trouble is, he’s the family lodgepole, breaking, in his adult life, under the weight. Remembering the future, forgetting the past.

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Out Backward

A Novel

Ross Raisin

HarperPerennial: 212 pp., $13.95 paper

THE LUSH language in this debut novel has some fine literary ears (Colm Toibin, Stewart O’Nan, Mary Karr) in awe. Ross Raisin’s hero, Sam Marsdyke, is ripe for a fall, made to work on the family farm in Yorkshire: “Sat on my rock there I let the world busy itself below, all manner of creatures going about their backwards-forwards same as always, never mind the fog had them half-sighted. But I could see above the fog. It bided under my feet, settled in the valley like a sump-pool. . . . “ At 19, he’s a sociopath, ostracized by the villagers, shunned by his parents, expelled from school for alleged sexual assault. He sees the world changing -- chains taking over the old shops, farmers beaten by E.U. subsidies, ancestral lands bought by out-of-towners for vacation homes. His childhood pranks have escalated to violence and paranoia. When a London girl moves nearby and befriends him, he kidnaps her and leads us down a dark delusional path. “It was too parlous yet, . . . We had to hide out a while longer, fettle up our plans, figure out how we’d manage stowing on a ship, bide a time until our faces weren’t so fresh in folks’ minds.” Still, your heart goes out to Sam, creature of the moors. There’s an ancient Celtic strain in Raisin’s writing, all but unspoken: the idea that monsters are the embodiments of our darkest selves, pushed to the edges of normal life, straining on the outskirts.

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The Man Who Ate the World

In Search of the Perfect Dinner

Jay Rayner

Henry Holt: 274 pp., $25

SPENDING lots of money dining out, writes Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for the London Observer, is deemed “an experiment in excess as filthy and reprehensible as snorting cocaine off the flattened bellies of supermodels or slaughtering white Bengal tigers to provide the fur trim for your panda-skin gloves.” But don’t think Rayner suffers guilt: This guy eats his way around the world looking for the perfect meal, money no object. He’s disappointed in Dubai, tantalized in Tokyo, nervous in New York (the experience overwhelms the food), nostalgic for childhood dishes in London, impoverished in Paris (he pays $1,250 for a meal). Rayner begins in Las Vegas and ends in France a bit worse for wear, like Don Quixote after the smoke and mirrors clear. Still hungry. For something simple.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com