THE PERFECT PLACE by Sheila Kohler...

THE PERFECT PLACE by Sheila Kohler (Alfred A. Knopf: $15.95)

The narrator, a middle-aged woman convalescing in the Swiss mountains, is a classic victim of sensual obsession. Brought into sexual awareness at too early an age (she would watch her mother “take off the most important of her garments, the foundation of mother’s rectitude”), she has been left with a deep uncertainty about where her own private boundaries end and where those of others begin. So blurred is her sense of self that she is the last in this novel to discover that many years ago, she might have killed a young girl.

At first, the narrator appears to be merely a bored bourgeois: “There are just far too many cows,” she complains at one point. We soon see, however, that her boredom is actually an attempt to expunge more turbulent emotions. To encourage a kind of neurasthenia, she tries to avoid all human contact except the alienating “intimacy” of sex. But one of her lovers persistently prods her memory, drawing forth an image of Daisy, an old classmate. The narrator tries mightily to deny Daisy’s significance--she was “not anyone who had any of the qualities I could have possibly admired, an ordinary girl in every way”--but her memories of the girl are obviously charged with erotic tension: “There was something about the way she scattered poppies . . . and then lay there herself, something light and quick, and at the same time reckless, something that one might even call abandonment, something that might be said to approach the poetic.” Soon, it becomes apparent that this gentle, proper narrator was in fact consumed by jealousy toward her classmates, whom she perceived as rivals for Daisy’s affection: “I wanted to hold her in my arms, to own her. She had something about her, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, as though it was enough just to stand there and be who she was . . . It has never been enough to be who I am.”

“A Perfect Place,” while a first novel, is an extraordinarily perceptive and controlled study of that mysterious mental landscape between subconscious and conscious, where feelings are clothed in various disguises after an early, traumatic experience in which they had been left naked, exposed to the rejection of others. Kohler poignantly captures the ingenious ways in which we can disguise love and the ways in which love can mask resentment, loneliness and subjugation.

THE CAGE KEEPER And Other Stories by Andre Dubus III (E. P. Dutton: $17.95)

Like his father Andre Dubus, the author crafts powerful stories about people struggling to find something to affirm in weary souls and bleak surroundings. With richly original and consistently believable sketches, Dubus carries us deep into the lives of his characters, from wardens to inmates and abused women, who live on society’s edge in prisons of their own or of their state’s construction.

We may resent Dubus for doing this, wondering how we can be enriched by the anger and sorrow that proves so destructive to his characters. His protagonists, like characters out of a Western, are often compelled to take violent and extreme actions to reclaim their self-respect. Unlike in “High Noon,” however, dueling only condemns them to more years of living on society’s edge. In the title story, for instance, Elroy, an inmate on furlough, kidnaps one of his prison guards: “I am through with your Fascist House and every other manner of institution for that matter . . . I am driving to Saskatchewan. It is there or dust for me.” And yet, while Elroy’s fate is to be the latter, Dubus’ story ultimately does prove enriching, for it is subtly affirmative: There is honor, Dubus shows us, in Elroy’s decision to do as he must.

Not all of Dubus’ stories are credible. In “Duckling Girl,” for example, a young woman is sexually abused by her father, brothers and “friends”; the characters in the story are so malevolent, so devoid of sympathy, that one finds them easy to hate, but hard to believe. At his best, though, Dubus captures the fragility behind his characters’ tough facades, as in “Forky,” whose protagonist briefly rediscovers the boy inside him when he meets a woman just after being released from prison. “I pull her closer . . . And when she doesn’t stiffen up on me I feel like my soul is being offered back. And for a second I see Ma, washin my hands, hers bigger than mine, all slippery and warm with the soap and water. And it feels like medicine.”

WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW A Friendship by Thomas Bernhard (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95)

Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, who died Feb. 12 of heart failure, shared the obsession of many contemporary German writers with guilt over coming of age in a fascist society, but not their respectable position as chroniclers of a national Angst . Bernhard was received as an enfant terrible in his country, and his ostracism, one gathers from this, his last novel, fueled his vitriol. Viennese psychiatrists are “the most incompetent,” he writes; Vienna’s doctors “have a closer affinity to a sex-killer than to their science”; Viennese coffeehouses are plagued by “foul air and poor lighting”; and Viennese newspapers, “are not newspapers at all but mass-circulation issues of unusable toilet paper.”

Negativity as absolute as this says more about observer than observed, of course, and this in fact turns out to be Bernhard’s point. “The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses,” the narrator admits toward novel’s end, “because in them I am always confronted with people like myself.” While readers, weary of the narrator’s complaining, will find his admission belated, the narrator does surprise us by refusing to accept his imperfection. Instead, he allies with Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the great philosopher, in a friendship that encourages mutual striving toward an unattainable mental and spiritual perfection. “Just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world,” the narrator reflects, “I too shall sooner or later come to grief.”

Though the novel ends on this thought, one senses that Bernhard has failed to face up to his narrator’s most fundamental source of discontent: his physical, as opposed to mental, inadequacy; specifically, his mortality. Death is an ever-present specter in these pages, as it was in the infirm Bernhard’s life. The narrator (who suffers from the same lung ailment that plagued Bernhard) meets Paul while convalescing in the hospital, and it is with more than idle curiosity that he watches his fellow patients “shuffle up and down the corridor in their hospital dressing gowns, then one day disappear forever.”

THE MUSHROOM PICKER by Zinovy Zinik (St. Martin’s: $16.95)

Like many dissident Soviet novels, “The Mushroom Picker” is centered around a boorish symbol of the behemoth Soviet state: Kostya, a rude and unpredictable Russian exile living in London with his British wife, Clea, and usually seen tearing off clumps of gristly meat from a bone or clutching bread in his hand “as though someone might be planning to take it away from him.” Soviet novelist Zinovy Zinik, who emigrated to Britain in 1985, surprises us in these witty pages, however, by creating a turn of plot that makes Kostya the most sophisticated character and by reserving his most ruthless satire for the West, particularly for British leftists such as Clea, dubbed “Nuclea” by Kostya for her incessant reminders that “a mushroom cloud of death . . . hangs over us all.”

Zinik’s outlook on both Eastern and Western society is as grim as his satire of their members is farcical. Zinik still seems troubled by dark memories of Moscow as he describes a trip Clea and her friend take to the city: “Only the moon behind their backs shone like a prison-camp searchlight,” Zinik writes, “while a painfully biting frost flayed their throats like emery paper and the wind whipped their faces like a knotted lash.” Even grimmer is his account of Clea’s journey through a London Christmas shopping crowd, which contrasts the “incurable egotism” masking as “sincere gestures of each individual’s concern for the collective” with the world of two street people rummaging through a garbage bin: “One of them was pawing a broken plastic doll that he had just pulled out of a heap of trash at the bottom of the container. . . . One of its arms had been torn off, its stomach was split open and its neck twisted; only its glass eyes stared . . . with the timeless, divine, commercialized blueness of the Holy Child that had been born that night.”