DISCOVERIES

God, am I weary of people telling me they don’t read fiction anymore. No art form weaves all of life’s threads together as a novel does, none. One can only assume that people have allowed their lives to become so fragmented by the screen and the amplifier and the mouthpiece that they can’t swallow the whole story anymore. They want information without context. No time for context, too busy.

Meg Wolitzer’s several decades of experience writing novels, creating characters whose lives affect others and still remain distinct on the page, save this from being a mid-list novel about middle-class people in mid-life with mid-range anxiety. Her characters are surprising people; their lives change daily, momentarily. Natalie, fiftysomething, is the mother of Sara, thirtysomething. They are very close and have been since Sara was small and her parents divorced. Each summer Sara shares a house on Long Island with several friends from college. They have history, these characters, the way friends do. In the summer of the novel, Sara is killed in a car crash. Natalie, distraught, goes to live with Sara’s friends for the duration of the season. All platitudes about losing a child fall by the wayside as Natalie loosens her grip on her daughter, never fully, but enough to live.

GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED UP CHICK; By Rachel Resnick; (St. Martin’s Press: 256 pp., $22.95)

Hey, Rachel, are we supposed to feel sorry for you? Is this a thinly veiled novel about your painful childhood, complete with bad grammar and the need to shock? “A horny little town,” Resnick writes in one of her fragmentary, paragraph-length chapters, “Hollywood’s in heat year-round.” We should just drop the idea, once and for all, that in order to be an L.A. writer you have to be freaky, hip, mean and skin-deep. That’s just something they like to think back East. I go a long way with an author who is trying to reveal an experience, recreate a piece of the pie that I haven’t eaten, but this is one self-indulgent book. Dennis Hensley’s “Misadventures in the (213)” describes a similar (OK, common) phenomenon: Young person moves to Hollywood after having marinated in the Midwest on pop culture and tries to make it. Hensley, however, was able to finish his sentences. He clearly wrote for his audience as well as for himself. Resnick’s wit is not so fast, her philosophy so deep or art so dimensional as to make this book worth reading for pleasure. Think of it as the warning label on the wrapper around Los Angeles.

THE CALLING: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns; By Catherine Whitney; (Crown: 272 pp., $23)

Why? Why become a nun? What is “the calling”? These are the questions Catherine Whitney, who almost became a nun but chose journalism instead, asks herself and the nuns she interviews for this book. “I don’t know,” she tells a friend at one point, “who’s calling me, and I don’t know what’s calling me, but it isn’t me calling me.” “The Other, then,” her friend responds, “it comes from the Other.” In telling us how and why she turned away from the nun’s life she was raised and educated to enter, Whitney tells us a great deal about those who choose and commit to that life. Rosary Heights in Seattle is the convent she was turned away from as a young woman--the mother superior (Mother Dominick) told Whitney she wasn’t ready. This is the convent she returns to, describing a year in the life of the sisters and how many of them came to be there.

Books often make good transitions for their authors, a way to finally answer a question (one reason writing a book is so often compared to giving birth). “The Calling” does this for Whitney. “I’m afraid,” Mother Dominick tells Whitney, 30 years after their first meeting, “it was simple pragmatism that caused you to be sent away.” She explains that they could no longer afford to take young girls, pay for their higher education, just to have them leave the convent. It is always thrilling, I think, to learn more about commitment--to God, to an institution or to a person. “The Calling” answers many questions about this mysterious vocation but leaves many more about the daily lives of the nuns. To answer those, she would have had to have taken the vows--and then she might never have written the book.

BURIED ONIONS; By Gary Soto; (HarperCollins: 160 pp., $11)

Here’s a real book about Southern California and about commitment. The image behind this novel’s title is a giant onion, “that remarkable bulb of sadness,” buried under the streets of Fresno that makes everyone cry. It starts with two deaths, two out of many that Eddie, 19 years old, has seen: Those of his friend Juan, whose head was caught in the giant rollers of a steel foundry, and his cousin, Jesus, who is summarily knifed in a men’s room over a comment about a homey’s shoes. “Noon glared like a handful of dimes,” writes Gary Soto, looking at the street the way his characters do. Friends and family members want Eddie to show his respect for his dead cousin by getting revenge. “Respect. That word got more people buried than the word love.” This is the story of Eddie’s efforts to resist the hamster-wheel of violence and crime that sucks up Mexican boys in Fresno, to commit to his own worth. “I wanted to sprint straight into the future,” he thinks, “but I kept going in circles.” Soto’s writing is crystal-clear, his metaphors fresh, his language vivid and true.

FOR THE TIME BEING; By Annie Dillard; (Alfred A. Knopf: 204 pp., $22)

Oh, strange new world! Oh, author fallen from the beaten path! Here she is, in another incarnation, and it is not like her sweet book, “An American Childhood” or even “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” let alone “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” Dillard appears to us now in a book so peculiar you could get stigmata reading it. “For the Time Being” is “a nonfiction first-person narrative, but it is not intimate,” she tells us, “and its narratives keep breaking.” That information appears in the first sentence of the book, and it is a breed of cave canem, a prelude to a chapter about human birth defects. Questions hover: “Does God cause natural calamity?”, “Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?” and “Why must we suffer losses?”. But they do not hold the book together, any more than logic can substantiate a mystery.

There is tundra in the book, there is Peking man, there is mystery, clouds, mathematics and maps. Within its two walls, Dillard tries to stretch her understanding of the universe: “Only some deeply grounded and fully paradoxical view of God,” she puzzles, “can make sense of the notion that God knows and loves each of 5.9 billion of us.”