FICTION

THE WOMAN WHO LIVES IN THE EARTH by Swain Wolfe. (HarperCollins: $18; 192 pp.) This is a parable, and if you are not used to reading parables, you may feel for about 20 or 30 pages that you are wandering in a desert full of familiar mirages, disappearing metaphors and cactus-like stick people. All of which is appropriate, for that is the terrain of this novel: some time, probably the past, but could also be a Mad Max-type future, a drought that brings out the meanest, basest, witch-hunting mentality in the local townspeople, a pure and honest family with a lovely, gifted child who becomes the target of the people’s bestial need for revenge against their gods. Most wonderful are the relationships between Sarah, the girl, and her great-grandmother Lilly, who comes to live with the family, and between Sarah and her totem animal, who she discovers walking across the mesa to get water from the neighbor’s creek. He is a fox, named Marishan, and she first encounters him when she sees herself walking on the mesa through his eyes. He shows her the world through the eyes of a hawk and a flower, and finally leads her to the Mysterious Woman under the ground who can make it rain. “How do you know,” Sarah asks Lilly, “when you’re imagining something and when it’s real?” “I cannot tell the difference,” says Lilly. “I never could. But that’s a secret. . . .”