DISCOVERIES

Happy endings, silver linings, sunny weather, healing journeys, normal childhoods, 50-year relationships; I’ll even throw in a patriarch at the head of the holiday table--maybe these things are not just for silly people in denial. Be as noir as you like, but at the end of this gruesome memoir, the detailed autopsy of a relationship, you’ll long for one of these things. You’ll rent “The Sound of Music.” Textier is French. She and her American husband have been married 18 years. They have two girls, ages 6 and 15. They live a pretty trendy life in New York; they both write (he has some vague projects in Hollywood), and together they’ve created a literary magazine. She’s proud of the stuff they have (clothes, apartment, etc.), but mostly she’s proud of their phenom sex life. One-half of the book is spent describing it. One-third is Textier wondering how any couple with such a great sex life could break up. One-quarter describes his affair and her incredulity that he could leave such great sex (the other woman is my friend, he says pretty simply at one point). Whatever’s left concerns the children. Textier goes a long way for this guy (primarily because of the great sex). She is dignified and honest (in her telling, anyway). She lets him take a long time to decide what to do before she tells him to leave. Then she sleeps with some very young men.

CHARITY: Stories. By Mark Richard (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 146 pp., $19.95)

Mark Richard has a gift for making us share the guilt with his characters and for his characters. There’s no returning to the safety of your world after reading his books, either his first novel, “Fishboy,” or this one. “By evening we had all dirtied our pockets with money,” he writes in “Where Blue Is Blue,” a fabulous story about a murdered contortionist. “The light was gone, the beer stands stood empty, spigots blowing foam. Trash drifted along the boardwalk, and on the beach drunks were getting knocked down by knee-high surf.” “Fun at the Beach” is a crystal meth trip that begins: “Got a letter from a girl said we ought to get together before her husband gets parole.” “The Birds for Christmas” is a heart-stopping story about two kids in a children’s hospital-orphanage and their Christmas wish. “Gentleman’s Agreement” is a blood-curdling story about a boy’s fear of his father. Children and simple people get hurt in these stories. The writing provides image grist for a reader’s fears and only the gentlest nudges toward moral conclusions.

SWEET WATER. By Kathryn Kramer (Alfred A. Knopf: 312 pp., $24)

There’s a New England hankering for a connection to the past in this novel about Greta, a woman with two lovers living in the home that 100 years earlier was the home of Lucinda, who also had two lovers. Echoes reverberate between Greta’s life in our times and Lucinda’s in the late 1800s. Greta and her husband, Ned, have bought the hotel-spa in Vermont that Lucinda started with her father. Crain had been Greta’s lover since she was 15. Their relationship had continued through her marriage to Ned and his to Julia until his death just before the novel opens. Greta is prepared to tell her son Henry at some point that Ned is not his father. Back in the 1800s, the love of Lucinda’s life is a famous author, O. Ned and Greta find O.’s lifetime of letters to Lucinda and her journals buried beneath their basement. It’s a book about secrets and how they fester over a lifetime--secrets as ghosts, secrets as prized possessions, secrets as burdens.

SKATING TO ANTARCTICA: A Journey to the End of the World. By Jenny Diski (Ecco: 250 pp., $23.95)

Jenny Diski had a miserable childhood in London. In her efforts to shake it, she overdoses; she goes in and out of psychiatric wards; she develops a fascination for Antarctica, its whiteness, its remoteness. Midlife, with a daughter of her own and several books written, she goes to Antarctica and, encouraged by her daughter, thinks about the mother she left when she was 14. In this memoir of her childhood and journal of her trip to Antarctica, Diski goes back to the neighborhood she lived in with her unhappy, self-involved and sometimes insane parents to speak with the 80-year-old ladies who remember her as a child. She firmly avoids a pop-psych resolution, claiming indolence as her “most essential quality,” and we are grateful for her unique humor and her irreverence. She reminds us that we can do what we want with our childhoods, even bury them in snow if that’s what we choose.

MISADVENTURES IN THE (213). By Dennis Hensley (William Morrow: 296 pp., $24)

Here’s your happy ending. Craig is a very funny writer who moves to L.A. He rents an apartment in Los Feliz, writes a screenplay and after months of yes-no, it gets produced. His childhood must have included at least 10 hours a day of television, judging from his intimacy with pop culture. His best friend, Dandy, is a real live television star with her own show, “That’s Dandy!” His other best friend, Claudia, is an actress who lives in his apartment building. Craig falls in love with Damon, fixed up by Damon’s talk-show-host father, Bink. “Damon and I alternate taking part in the kind of purposeless hypothetical musing I live for . . , Damon cranking the radio when ‘All I Want’ by Toad the Wet Sprocket came on.” When Damon dumps him, Craig meets Godfrey (“the Snack”) while working as an extra on the set of “Murder, She Wrote” (“ ‘Emmy, She Lost,’ I suggest. ‘Freedent, She Chewed,’ Godfrey counters.”). It’s extra-light, extra-fast, with a little bit of inside Hollywood humor. On a trip to Disneyland, posing with Tigger, Dandy says of the “minimum-wager sweating inside the animal head next to her, ‘I’d rather work at a Burger King managed by Scott Rudin,’ ” It’s good to laugh at L.A., especially when you live here. The best friend thing is nicely done, the meaningful gay relationship search is a bummer but, hey, no one has very far to fall here--we’re already at sea level and someday someone will buy your screenplay, right? This is a novel about what to do while you’re waiting.