THE DREAM OF A BEAST by...

THE DREAM OF A BEAST by Neil Jordan (Random House: $12.95)

Like “Blue Velvet” and “Parents,” two recent films about the domestic 1950s, this inspired, surrealistic novel reveals the emotional currents swirling beneath the calm surface of suburban life. But rather than depicting these feelings as a dark, dangerous underworld best suppressed with a smile, as the films have done, Jordan, director of the 1986 film “Mona Lisa” and one of Ireland’s preeminent fiction writers, presents them as sources of great energy and creativity. By relating to our environment more viscerally, Jordan suggests, we can overcome the alienation that arises from stultifying routine.

The novel begins with portents of change and decay hanging in the air. A heat wave envelopes the narrator’s community and strange blooms begin to grow from cracks in the pavements, easing their way along the shop fronts and covering plate-glass windows with “thick, oily, unrecognizable leaves.” The mysterious “changes” begin to transform the narrator as well, who becomes acutely sensitive to his neighborhood for the first time, noticing “the extraordinary scent” of its gardens, “moist and heavy, like a thousand autumns, acres of hay longing to be cut. . . . All the gardens seemed to sing at once, a symmetrical hum of praise to (the) afternoon.” As his sensitivity to the natural world grows, however, his connection with human society becomes more tenuous; soon, he loses hold of even language’s tether, hearing only the underlying patterns in cocktail party chatter, from the “soft, conch-like” voice of his wife, “falling like a wave, as if to protect me,” to the hum of a timid friend, like “an insect beating its wings fiercely, to escape.”

The narrator then undergoes a symbolic journey, brilliantly portrayed with vivid, thoughtful imagery, which ultimately brings him closer to his wife and daughter than he had been when the “changes” began. His odyssey might be called a dream, but it is actually more reminiscent of a journey back to childlike consciousness, where colors, textures and sounds surprise and evoke intense feelings. The narrator’s journey suggests that this state of consciousness can be far more revelatory than adulthood, an abstract state of mind based on not being surprised (and thus endangered) by the environment.

Ultimately, then, “The Dream of a Beast” is an eloquent testament to the value of listening to the poetry of everyday life, something the narrator appreciates one night as his daughter sleeps in a nearby room: “The house was silent now but for a rustling of bedclothes somewhere and the tiny hum of Matilde’s breath. I stood on the landing, listening to the new quality of this silence. Slowly it came to me that silence was not what for years I had supposed it to be, the absence of sound. It was the absence, I knew now, of the foreground sounds so the background sounds could be heard. These sounds were like breath--like the breath of this house, of the movement of the air inside it, of the creatures who lived in it.”

WIND Stories by Leigh Allison Wilson (William Morrow: $17.95)

Fortunately, the bleakness of so much contemporary American fiction isn’t entirely reflective of the national mood, for in periods of complacency such as the 1950s and ‘80s, authors often gravitate toward malcontents, overlooking those who gain some satisfaction simply from endeavoring to carry on. One writer who hasn’t forgotten these ordinary folk, however, is Leigh Wilson, who portrays them with admiration in this quiet and sensitive collection.

At moments, underlying anxieties penetrate the calm reserve of Wilson’s characters and their emotions briefly spiral into panic: One woman, for instance, looks out her window at castles of ice and reflects, “I thought maybe I was dying.” Wilson’s characters are also, despite their natural gregariousness, strangely unable to connect with others; the short story form seems to make it difficult for Wilson to provide a context for their isolation.

By and large, however, Wilson’s protagonists persevere as optimistically as possible, having achieved a sense of equanimity despite their diminished expectations. One particularly representative character, for instance, a UPS truck driver by day and pool player by night, has accepted these “simple facts”: “Maps are flat; cities are not. Obstacles are everywhere, but the good driver knows where they are and how to avoid them.”

TALES OF NATURAL AND UNNATURAL CATASTROPHES by Patricia Highsmith (Atlantic Monthly: $16.95)

The catastrophes actually are all “unnatural,” prompted when Patricia Highsmith’s bizarre, blundering characters attempt to defy nature: the defense tactics of a high-rise crumble against a crawling army that fumigation can’t kill; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finds that its hiding place for nuclear waste isn’t so sporting after all; a Japanese whaling ship gets its due after a day harpooning whales.

While best known as a writer of thrillers, Highsmith, a Texas-born author now living in Switzerland, is primarily concerned with crafting stories to evoke the human comedy. Her wry portrayals of human folly sometimes lack sympathy, as in the tasteless piece “Rent-a-Womb,” which trivializes the abortion debate. But Highsmith condescends wittily and without favor, and so we soon cease to take offense, enjoying stories we might otherwise have dismissed as prejudiced.

“Mabuti,” for example, satirizes the dictator of a small African nation, who frantically tries to prepare for the arrival of a United Nations delegation, burning everything from garbage to corpses and trying to transform Government House, a brothel with “a couple of rooms holding papers with which the country gained its independence,” into a “building like the Parthenon.” Everything goes awry, of course: The city is shrouded in smoke from the burning when the delegation arrives and the Government house erupts in a conflagration when Mabuti soldiers try to “properly” cremate people who had died in an elevator. The U.N. members are less-than-pleased--so Bomo has them shot.

FROM A DISTANT PLACE by Don Carpenter (North Point Press: $17.95)

A credible depiction of the dark side of a much-heralded American dreamland--Marin County--”From a Distant Place” focuses on Jackie Jeminovski, a 45-year-old former stewardess whose emotional stability and mental self-assurance stem wholly from the perception of others that she “has arrived.” Jackie’s image, projected by her trim figure and huge house, is just that, for her house is both too expensive for her budget and too expansive for herself (she is divorced and her children are living on their own).

Refreshingly, though, “From a Distant Place” doesn’t moralize. An alcoholic, Jackie avoids any real intimacy; one night, for example, she leaves a room where she had been talking with two male friends and reemerges wearing only her high heels. Beaming, she tells her friends “I love you.” Instead of offering portentous judgments about Jackie’s blithe, superficial spirit, though, Carpenter suggests that in some ways it helps her fill the “big empty space” she feels “between housewife and grandmother” and encourages her to accept others more readily than she accepts herself. She forgives her 20-year-old son Derek, for example, when he comes home after being in jail for the first time: “She did not want to pry the truth out of him. She didn’t really care. She felt too good, just having him back. None of it made any sense anyway. Just like the rest of her life.”

Derek is Carpenter’s most intriguing character, as self-critical as his mother is self-deluding. Once a boy of fragile self-esteem, he cultivates an inner confidence in the course of these pages that allows him to take a low-status job in a shoe-store and not “care when former classmates come into the store and are patronizing. Let them. He would grin and look shy and sell them shoes.” As unconventionally as many of Carpenter’s earlier characters, Derek comes of age after participating in a robbery, emerging from it “if possible even more confused than before. But at least he knew one thing by now, he could take his cowardice in his hands sometimes and control it, get past it, and find himself in a world where nothing mattered but what he wanted.”