DISCOVERIES

THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT: Stories. By Aimee Bender (Doubleday: 184 pp., $21.95)

Imagine that we are all survivors of a terrible storm or train wreck or war. One member of our group is truly funny, distracting us by putting really bizarre images into our heads. The images, such as a man with a hole in his stomach and a pregnant wife, or a librarian who seduces every man in her library, or a girl in a skirt that has caught fire, have just enough meaning to make us fall silent when we finish laughing. Chuckling and learning, what could be better?

Bender has perfect pitch. Her stories are fierce and true. In “Call My Name,” a girl who thinks she can have anything auditions men on the bus to find a lover, follows one home, makes him cut her dress off and then lies on his couch while he, totally disinterested, watches TV. Funny, not funny, right? In “Marzipan,” the wife of the man with the hole in his stomach gives birth to her mother. “Mother? . . . What are you doing here? Mommy?” Possible only in the circus of metaphor, correct? In “Quiet Please,” a librarian whose father has just died propositions every man who approaches her desk. The first one admits to having a fantasy about a librarian--”he’s on her like Wall Street rain.” Ludicrous! Fantastic!

VISIBLE WORLDS. By Marilyn Bowering (HarperFlamingo: 304 pp., $24)

The organic model for this novel is an atom with electrons spinning away from the nucleus. The narrator is Albrecht; his twin brother is Gerhard. They grow up in a factory town in Winnipeg, Canada, in the 1930s. The Bone family, Bill and Bella and their children, Nate and Lily, live next door. One night, Nate, 12, is peering in another neighbor’s windows when his little sister, Lily, whom he is supposed to be watching, spills boiling water all over herself and dies from the burns. Nate becomes the nucleus of the novel. He grows up twisting around this scar, eventually stealing a newborn baby and running off in search of his father, who has run off with the circus and another woman from this ever-shrinking town. The Depression and World War II compress passions and actions. Every child in the novel is treated with casual cruelty. Any one of the characters could fill up a novel; together, they form a powerful, sweet, sad chorus.

STIGMATA. By Phyllis Alesia Perry (Hyperion: 236 pp., $21.95)

In her 14th year, Lizzie is given a trunk containing her grandmother’s journal, a quilt with squares that illustrate the family’s history and several other bits of family lore. Her great-great grandmother Ayo (Bessie) was a slave, kidnapped in Africa, who died in 1900. Grace, her grandmother, packed the trunk and ran away from her family in 1940. Her daughter Sarah, Lizzie’s mother, never fully understood this disappearance and denies her heritage.

After Lizzie opens the trunk, she begins to drift in and out of the present tense, living first Grace’s life, then Ayo’s. She develops stigmata, wrist scars from irons used on the slave ship and scars on her back from beatings. Her parents have her committed. Twenty years later she emerges, supposedly cured. Slowly, by making her own quilt, Lizzie is able to convince her mother that she is Grace, reincarnated as Sarah’s daughter (“I came as soon as I could,” she tells her shocked and frightened mother). Perry is a gifted storyteller. She has written an archetypal tale of echoes, certain to hit the bestseller lists.

THE BUDDHA IN MALIBU. By William Harrison (University of Missouri Press: 214 pp., $18.95)

Childhood is tough on both coasts. This collection is the L.A. equivalent of “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” that prototype bummer of New England family life. Parents in Harrison’s evocation of Malibu have sunshine and instantaneous gratification on their minds. Children follow suit with galloping materialism and drugs. In “The Rocky Hills of Trancas,” the narrator’s father, a handsome, philandering would-be screenwriter, is caught repeatedly by his son while cheating on his wife. After sleeping with his son’s girlfriend, he runs away. His son grows up to be a screenwriter who, by rewriting his father’s never-used stories, makes it big time. In “The Buddha in Malibu,” Brock goes to work as a security guard for a paranoid producer. When Ennis (the producer) wounds Brock to invigorate his own career, Brock should leave, but he takes a pay raise instead. In “The Cockatoo Tower,” Corey, of the genus contractor, species Malibu, thinks of his clients: “They were made of flesh and money.” Some of the stories are set in Africa, and a few are about soldiers suffering some form of post-traumatic stress. But after the L.A. stories, which are the first in the collection, a funny thing happens. A reader waits for the inevitable sell-out. Most of the central characters have no character. One’s willingness to trust any of them is sorely tried.

THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO HER MOTHER: Seven Stages of Change in Women’s Lives. By Kim Chernin (Viking: 222 pp., $23.95)

“Teaching the mother to become a mother,” writes Kim Chernin, empathic psychoanalyst and impish novelist, “is one sense in which a daughter gives birth to her own mother.” Using stories from her clients, she identifies seven stages in this process: idealizing the mother and childhood; revision of the story; blaming the mother; forgiving the mother; identifying with the mother and looking for blame in society; letting go of the attachment to and the reactive relationship with the mother; and giving birth to the mother, sending her off.

Chernin’s method is storytelling, “every woman her own Scheherazade, spinning her tales through a thousand and one nights in her effort to understand herself.” She tells the stories of six women who gave birth to their mothers and then she tells a little piece of her own story. Chernin is a good listener; she says so herself. She is honest when they frighten her, and she believes them, no matter what they tell her. Only a novelist could do that.