DISCOVERIES

TRIAGE. By Scott Anderson (Scribner: 240 pp., $23)

Mark bugs me. He’s a freelance combat photographer, one of those cowboys addicted to war zones, not one for words. Hard on girls, trades stories with other photographers over beers, wears black. Do Not Disturb sign hung around his neck. On its flip side in small letters: Please Risk Everything You Are To Try To Figure Me Out Because I Sure As Hell Can’t Do It. His confusion, upon returning from Kurdistan, where he received an artillery shell in his skull, is what drives this thrilling novel. What happened to his best friend Colin, who was there with him and whose wife, back in New York, is about to have a baby? He struggles to repress this as he paces his New York loft. Mark’s gracious, nonintrusive girlfriend, Elena, worries but does not push. It is her grandfather, who ran a rehab clinic for war criminals of the Spanish Civil War, who arrives from Spain to cure Mark and win his granddaughter’s respect. “Pain is always preferable to numbness,” says the Muslim doctor who first puts Mark back together in a cave in Kurdistan. A romantic idea, found only in books.

BY THE LIGHT OF MY FATHER’S SMILE. By Alice Walker (Random House: 222 pp., $22.95)

“There’s not enough father!” say the two friends, Susannah and Irene, remembering the cry heard in fairy tales. Indeed, Susannah’s father has gone to heaven, an angel now, looking down on his daughter--not the one he worried the most about, but Susannah, the one whose love he lost when he beat her sister for sleeping with a village boy. Part fairy tale, part myth, written in at least two dimensions and across decades, this novel strangely conforms to and fulfills a reader’s need for wisdom. It’s an eight-ball of a novel--ask it a question and an enigmatic little answer will appear on the screen. Why do we let others shape our lives for us? Is a woman who loves women likelier to be happy? How do you get out from under the memories that make you weak?

NAMAKO: Sea Cucumber. By Linda Watanabe McFerrin (Coffee House Press: 256 pp., $14.95)

“For a while,” says Ellen, remembering the year she turned 9 and her family moved to Japan, “almost every word that came out of my mouth was a lie.” “Namako” is a novel about a child’s virgin dance with the truth, with lies and with secrets. Each new violation of trust is like a footprint on the tundra, refining the way the child walks through life. It begins when she catches her father in an affair and reveals the affair to her mother. The punishment for telling the truth is the family’s sudden move to Japan, where Ellen’s mother, Sara, grew up. Reminiscent of Susan Minot’s “Monkeys,” the novel moves through various family episodes in which sibling relationships are formed and broken and re-formed. Secrets are kept, traded upon and revealed, leaving their keepers dangerously brittle and permanently vulnerable. The sea cucumber in formaldehyde that Ellen steals from her biology teacher, an animal named for a vegetable, is full of secrets. It doesn’t seem right, she thinks, watching her strong, silent grandmother dying, “for living things to pass silently from existence with their secrets still locked up inside them.”

THE STAR FACTORY. By Ciaran Carson (Arcade: 296 pp., $23.95)

Here is Ciaran Carson’s Belfast: “a kettle steaming on the hob, the cast-iron mincer clamped to the deal table,” “dryads” that “murmur from within the trees, and moths [that] flit through the dappled moonshine, trembled by a zephyr.” There are headlights bouncing off the “gravestones and blank stone eyes of archangels in an orchestra of random constellated Morse” in the Milltown cemetery, a childhood of “kick the tin,” “tig” and “hide-and-seek,” an education in which, “after seven consecutive wrongs . . . a boy would be entitled to sixty-four slaps.” “The Star Factory” is a collection of Carson’s random meditations on the city he grew up in, in which he learned the story of the haunted star factory--an abandoned mill that produced boys’ clothing. The city was the birthplace of the Titanic, his storytelling father’s town. It is, he tells us as he wanders through it, “the fractious epic that is Belfast.”

EAST INTO UPPER EAST. By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint: 272 pp., $24)

We are ushered into the stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala the way a gracious hostess pulls you into her home, takes off your coat, tells you something about a guest; in short, makes you comfortable. It’s a good thing, too; her stories are all set in precarious contexts (perhaps why she is often compared to Chekhov), families on the brink of destruction, cultures trying to annihilate one another, the fingers of colonialism scraping against the blackboards of continents. Running through them are examples of the way love dignifies those who are true to it, the elder brother who still believes in his little brother’s sweetness, the daughter who stands by her mother through various humiliations, the repaired marriage that inspires a man and a woman to be true to their spirits. In many ways, these individuals carry the whole weight of their cultures: Indian, British or American.

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE. By Doris Grumbach (Beacon Press: 144 pp., $18)

At age 27, Doris Grumbach felt the presence of God. In a flash, on the steps of her house north of New York City, alone in a rare moment for a mother of two children. Fifty years went by before she began to yearn for that presence, which she remembered with an acute clarity. She feels that she has become a prisoner of her own self, that she “could not move out or over or beyond it.” “Old age,” she writes, “is the dim pillar of cloud in which bodily infirmity increases and the smoke of drifting days threatens to obscure the limited horizon.” In this little book, Grumbach struggles to learn how to pray. She prefers solitude to churchy potluck suppers; she reads the work of seekers before her, returning to the writings of Simone Weil and an anonymous monk who wrote in the 14th century. While she does not experience that particular presence again, she learns to live with its absence and to pray for its return.