A Coven of Women by Jean Brody (Atheneum: $15.95; 224 pp.) : The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson (Knopf: $15.95; 177 pp.)

Two short new novels, “A Coven of Women” and “The Red Truck,” start with the premise that life doesn’t end in death. Both books treat time as fragmentary and of little import when compared to the connections between people.

One of these novels, “A Coven of Women,” is wonderful to read, probably fodder for a film and hard to put down until the final page.

The other, “The Red Truck,” is a disturbing book, so vivid that I found myself having to stop reading from time to time so I could assimilate the powerful prose and extraordinary descriptions.

Both books attempt to deal with the rather dated theme of reincarnation and both do it through powerful writing and a lack of self-justification. In North American fiction, this is unusual.

“A Coven of Women,” by Jean Brody, touches on the relationships among eight central women. Some are related to each other by blood, others by circumstances and friendships. Each of their stories is told in one chapter, and at the book’s end, the women come together to solve the eternal question of whether or not to have a child. They leave the book to look for a “big old white house for Catherine,” to spend a few days in a small town that most of them know, to move on to “Mt. Shasta and Dorian’s stream,” for a quick trip to the jungle, and then they are going back to work.

“What work?” you ask. In the words of one character, “Up to Berkeley to help out Becky; that poor child is trying to save the world single-handedly. Emily’s going to teach her how to write fool presidents out of office.”

Emily knows how to write people out--her husband died after she turned her attention to removing him from her life. And Becky, Becky Valentine, has the gift of editing lives. She can remove the garbage of a life like a film editor can edit out the bad camera shots in a movie. Becky can get people on and moving with a new narrative--a new life. She would win an Academy Award for film editing if lives were merely film.

“A Coven of Women” plays on the themes that women in groups talk about--men, work, children, eternity, the misuse of power by misguided men, the future of the race, the interconnectedness of all women. It does so without being cloying, cute, condescending or critical.

“The Red Truck” is less easily understood unless the reader is familiar with Julio Cortazar, surrealism, hallucinations and violence. Or unless the reader responds on an intimate and visceral level to Rudy Wilson’s forceful and evocative use of image and color. In other words, “The Red Truck” is for the experienced reader, the reader who expects more than narrative from a book. And a reader with a strong stomach for one of the most vivid, horrid scenes ever written--a flashback to a murder and rape during the Civil War.

Wilson fragments narrative to serve emotion. He brings feelings into focus and uses history to remind the reader that there is more to his or her life than the rigors of institutionalism or, as the Bible calls them, “principalities and powers.”

“The Red Truck” is taken from a vision of one of Wilson’s protagonists of Christ as a red truck. It’s an interesting idea, but one that does not stand the biblical test of Christ as “not made by men’s hands.” What it does is recall for the reader an event that occurred on the day Cortazar died in France, several years ago.

Cortazar was one of a band of contemporary Latin-American surrealistic writers who had disentangled time from its popular linear acceptance in the human mind. Cortazar wrote of the mental blocks caused by time and of the seemingly unrelated events that make up the minutiae of daily life.

On the day he died, the truck drivers in France went on a nationwide strike. Seemingly unrelated to Cortazar’s death, the strike stalled all traffic and blocked all highways in that country. Cortazar’s fans, colleagues and fellow writers thought the event symbolic--that somehow the spirit of Cortazar was having a massive belly laugh over the fact that at his passing, all traffic came to a halt.

I cannot explain Wilson’s book to you. I can only tell you that when reading it, one senses that Wilson knows he’s onto something. He knows that color is from mind, God; that form and identity are individual and yet collective, that we all dream dreams of loneliness and height and sex and smell, and that in the final analysis, random events are transitory, and spiritual individuality is eternal.

If that sounds like more than a reader wants from a book this summer, look at Wilson’s book in the light of Shirley MacLaine’s writings, and be grateful that a writer has seriously and profoundly addressed the vagaries of contemporary American--i.e., the United States--thought on the topic of eternal life.

Read both books in the light of eternal possibilities and repetitive patterns, and you will garner a sense that there are stirrings afoot in contemporary fiction that you will be cross with yourself for having missed, were you not to explore the writing and ideas that these two new and brave and extremely competent writers are offering in place of the stagnant mentality in many books published today.