A DANGEROUS FRIEND; By Ward Just; Houghton Mifflin: 256 pp., $25

Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”--American fiction writers have conjured up powerful portraits of war, largely from the foot soldier’s chaotic point of view. But war as experienced by the policymakers, the civilian shapers, the power holders and the bureaucrats has not been a subject of American fiction. In fact, power generally has not much been favored by fiction writers. Ward Just has been the exception. Since the 1970s, he has brought us rare tales from the back rooms, bedrooms and corridors of influence and power in Washington. It is typical of him that in “A Dangerous Friend,” his fierce new book about the Vietnam War, there are no soldiers, no bloody battles and only one dead body. Its pages are filled with civilians--bored, ambitious or idealistic volunteers, low-level officials in flight from the blandness of a vast provincial empire and launched happily on a “nation-building” adventure in a distant land. If you want to know what it must have felt like in 1965 to sit around a table in a suburb of Saigon, burning with energy and weighing the reams of facts that should have but never did tell Americans what was happening in Vietnam, this is the book to come to. It is amazing how much emotion Just can pack into the least novelistic of passages--into lists of projects and products and creature comforts, even of American visitors who paraded through the country. It is cumulatively a brutal portrait of Americans living in a country they are incapable of seeing.

HEAVY WATER And Other Stories; By Martin Amis; Harmony Books: 208 pp., $21

The world is grim when you turn to Martin Amis for comic relief. His thickly layered, sardonic, ironic, bitter British carping is soothing, downright restful after a meaningful wallow in the subconscious with a writer like Kirsty Gunn. More witty banter! More repartee! And these stories are very funny, especially “Career Move,” in which Amis makes fun of the Hollywood machinery. In the world of this story, the product is poetry. Producers option poems and go into rewrites and pre-production and negotiate contracts and watch the competition. “ ‘Luke?’ said Jeff. ‘Jeff. Luke. You’re a very talented writer. It’s great to be working on ‘Sonnet’ with you. Here’s Joe. . . . [T]he only thing we have a problem on ‘Sonnet’ with, Luke, so far as I can see, anyway, and I know Jeff agrees with me on this--right, Jeff?--and so does Jim, incidentally, Luke,’ said Joe, ‘is the form.’ Luke hesitated. Then he said, ‘You mean the form ‘Sonnet’s’ written in.’ ‘Yes that’s right, Luke. The sonnet form.’ . . . ‘Go with the lyric,’ said Jim. ‘Or how about a ballad?’ said Jeff. Jack was swayable. ‘Ballads are big,’ he allowed. . . . ‘Let’s face it,’ said Jeff, ‘Sonnets are essentially hieratic. They’re strictly period. They answer to a formalized consciousness . . . . Were we on coke when we said, in the summer, that we were going to go for the sonnet?’ ” If you lived here (and you do), you’d be home now. Amis is at his very best in the stories with the simplest structures. These allow his dialogue and his near-perfect pitch to make a reader laugh at the naive posturing we all do to stay alive.

GODS GO BEGGING; By Alfredo Vea; Dutton: 336 pp., $23.95

The greatest pleasure for a book reviewer is to announce the appearance of a wonderful novel and become in the process a public benefactor bearing good news. Alfredo Vea is today’s news. But who is Vea? Readers of “La Maravilla” or “The Silver Cloud Cafe” need no introduction to his talent. For the rest of you, he is a defense lawyer who grew up as a farm worker and is becoming one of California’s best novelists.

“Gods Go Begging,” a meditation on the Vietnam War and on race, desire and urban gang wars, equals the passion and originality of his earlier work. But Vea goes beyond it in this depiction of a half-familiar, half-exotic world where horrific violence coexists with love and whimsy, just as Cajun spices and Vietnamese nuoc mam blend at the Amazon Luncheonette on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. Here, co-owners Persephone Flyer and Mai Adrong have been murdered, seemingly senseless homicides for which an illiterate African American youth, Calvin Thibault, has been arrested. Calvin’s lawyer is Jesse Pasadoble, who met Persephone’s husband on a hill in Vietnam that they were defending against North Vietnamese attackers, including Mai’s husband. The husbands were lost in action and are presumed dead.

You’ve read this story before, of vets haunted by ‘Nam, and you worry that Vea might imbue this novel with the same magical, angelic realism that sometimes jostled uneasily with the Central Valley dirt-and-dance-hall realism in “The Silver Cloud Cafe.” But he doesn’t, and his rendering of the Vietnam War and its aftermath--from the viewpoint of black and Chicano grunts--is thoroughly original. The magic doesn’t disturb the realism; it enhances it, like the refrain to a song, a song about “all the boys on all the hills” and the women who mourn them.

GIFTS; By Nuruddin Farah; Arcade: 246 pp., $23.95

The war-torn, famine-ravaged east African capital city of Mogadishu is the setting for “Gifts,” one of the three novels that make up Nuruddin Farah’s “Blood in the Sun” trilogy. Neither a conventional saga with a continuing story nor a telling of the same story from different perspectives in the mode of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” this trilogy, set in Somalia, comprises three separate novels, each with its own story and its own cast of characters, each expanding on a distinct and resonant theme. “Maps,” published in 1987, is a powerful, intensely poetic story of a Somali infant boy, orphaned by war, tenderly raised by an Ethiopian woman who later betrays the nationalist cause he grows up to champion. “Secrets,” published in 1998, mingles realism and myth in its story of a Somali woman who, after years abroad, returns to her native land to seek out her childhood playmate. Duniya, the heroine of “Gifts,” is a 34-year-old head nurse at a maternity ward in Mogadishu. A model of competence, calm and efficiency, she is a woman who has learned to rely on herself. Her efforts have been made more difficult by the fact that she is a woman in a male-dominated culture, and she is very much aware of this. Farah has a gift for writing about seemingly ordinary feelings and events in a way that recovers their essential strangeness. Born in 1945, Farah left his native Somalia in the late 1970s and did not return until some 20 years later. Although concerned with the various political, social and economic questions confronting his countrymen, his fiction is not designed solely to expose parlous conditions or propose specific solutions. Imaginative, introspective, psychologically acute, linguistically inventive, Farah weaves together myth, dream and realism to create literature that is truly world-class.

THE ROAD TO MARS; By Eric Idle; Pantheon: 310 pp., $24

Science fiction and comedy aren’t strangers, but they haven’t often been buddies, either. Most stories set in the future elicit awe or dread or sober speculation, not laughter. The exceptions prove the rule: Ed Wood’s movies, whose hilarity is accidental; Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadore, a fantasy of escape for characters trapped in contemporary Earth-bound horrors; the ration of wisecracks allowed to serious Enterprisers on “Star Trek”; the campy nastiness of “Mars Attacks!” Eric Idle, formerly of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” however, has written not just a funny novel about the 24th century, not just a novel about 24th century comedians, but a novel in the form of a theory of comedy conceived by an android, who concludes: “May the farce be with you.”

DRAGON HUNT; By Tran Vu; Translated from the Vietnamese by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong; Hyperion: 146 pp., $21

The Vietnamese are still something of a mystery to us, and Tran Vu, born in Vietnam in 1962, presents a resonant vision of his native land and its natives in exile in “The Dragon Hunt,” elegantly translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. We hardly catch a mention of the Vietnam War until the last story in this slim book, yet the five stories in this collection are clearly inspired by the devastation that occurred during those long, harsh years of conflict. Only catastrophe on a national scale could engender such chaos. Like war itself, the sequence of stories begins with clarity and ends in havoc. The war in Vietnam, like all wars, didn’t end with armistice. The effects linger and fester and occasionally--as in the case of “The Dragon Hunt”--produce literature. Depending on one’s level of cynicism, this is either a small price to pay for the horrors of history or small recompense.

HANNIBAL; By Thomas Harris; Delacorte: 486 pp., $27.95

Whether in Washington, D.C., and environs, in Florence or Sardinia or Buenos Aires, action, when not exploding, smolders. Like Herman Melville, Thomas Harris believes that it is better to sleep with a sober cannibal than with a drunken Christian. While Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” designed to while away a count’s sleepless hours, tinkle in the background, admirable heroine and villain-hero face down villain-victims richly deserving of their victimhood. As they dodge traps, nip past ambushes, surmount and master dangers, succumb only to rise again, the book maintains speed. Pages flame with blood; gory perfidiousness rages; turpitude lashes out; maniacs, madcaps, louts and brutes maim, slaughter and betray; but the ignoble get their comeuppance as they should. The book that began with a shootout culminates in a bang-up feast: a sumptuous banquet amid flowers, crystal and fine silverware, where a contemptible rogue provides the plat de resistance. And if the taste is gamy, flavor continues fine. What can be true of dinners is equally true of tales. In the arts, nothing lives except works that give pleasure. “Hannibal” speaks to the imagination, to the feelings, to the passions, to exalted senses and to debased ones. Harris’ voice will be heard for a while. No doubt the movie will too.

LIFE IN THE AIR OCEAN; Stories; By Sylvia Foley; Alfred A. Knopf: 162 pp., $21

The air ocean of Sylvia Foley’s challenging debut story collection refers to the oxygen-rich atmosphere that envelops the Earth. It’s a place where, for the Mowry family of Carville, Tenn., the very act of breathing contains the threat of drowning and suffocation. Daniel Mowry grew up in Massachusetts during the Depression; in “Boy Wonder,” he tries, unsuccessfully, to take flight in the backyard while his mother metes out kisses through the mesh of a screen door. With such a frigid Yankee upbringing, it’s no wonder Daniel grows up to be a refrigeration engineer. Still, he’s drawn to warmer climes; he marries Iris, a self-hating nurse from Memphis who eats only eggs, and moves to Tennessee; in “Elemenopy” we find them living “on a dead end road.” When, in “Cloudland,” they’ve moved to Colombia, the tropics offer no relief: “[O]n the antiplano, living on thin air, they were prisoners of altitude.” Foley refuses to allow the Mowrys any way out. When daughter Ruth runs her head into a concrete wall, we suspect that the bad behavior has been handed down to the next generation; the assumption is borne out in “A History of Sex,” which finds Ruth, now an undergraduate, hawkish on both Vietnam and impersonal sex. Foley’s stories are relentlessly grim, but they glint with cold, steely wisdom.

THE SOPRANOS; By Alan Warner; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 256 pp., $23

For those of us Americans raised on the anthems of Frank Zappa and the plays of Chris Durang, Alan Warner’s requiem to a Catholic School girls’ choir carries with it the nostalgic remembrance of fractured censers and smashed adolescences past. In “The Sopranos,” the British author of the cult classic “Morvern Callar” cracks open the door to the confessional and verifies all our voyeuristic suspicions of what the real life of a 17-year-old Catholic schoolgirl is all about--at least in rural Scotland. “The Sopranos” tells of five “heroic bimboics”--Kylah, Chell, Manda, Orla and Fionnula (The Cooler)--who make up the soprano section of the Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls Choir, and their fateful trip from the Port of the Capitol to compete in the national singing finals. Warner’s writing is wittily, maddeningly good. His language is so poetic in its capture of person and place that one keeps turning the page looking for a “Catcher in the Rye” (or even the Scotch) behind the next pub. Fionnula (“The Cooler”) and the middle-class, university-bound Kay Clark (a second but with a great pair of legs) threaten a spring awakening of their own, as the Max and Moritz of the Forth. But at each launching pad toward Literature with a capital L, Warner reminds us that his heroines are pedestrians, ordinary girls, sopranos of East Enders and not the West End.

THE STONES CRY OUT; By Hikaru Okuizumi; Translated from the Japanese by James Westerhoven; Harcourt Brace: 144 pp., $20

“The Stones Cry Out” won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in Japan and is the first of Hikaru Okuizumi’s novels to be translated into English. It is the story of Tsuyoshi Manase, whose wartime experiences in the Philippines have created twin veins of delight and horror that run beneath the landscape of his life. With a few restrained strokes, Okuizumi tackles the legacy of World War II and the uncertain possibility of absolution. Smoothly translated by James Westerhoven, Okuizumi’s prose is full of glassy surfaces that tilt to reveal vertigo-inducing depths. His characters are allegorical figures of Japan’s past and present, and his message seems to be that there is no redemption for the horrors of war, no way to lay nightmarish memories to rest. “Manase’s landscapes were worm-eaten. The canvases had black holes that became wider every day.” There are only his beloved stones, hard and unforgiving but hiding radiance behind their dull exteriors.

STILL WATERS IN NIGER; By Kathleen Hill; Triquarterly Books / Northwestern University Press: 206 pp., $24.95

In a fundamental sense, all novels can be said to be about journeys: journeys into other lives, minds, families, places; journeys through time, with its powerful capacity to mold and mystify, to contain meaning and to obscure it; journeys--often--of the self, in which a character seeks to learn how he came to be who he is, and why.

Kathleen Hill’s resonant and probing first novel, “Still Waters in Niger,” charts an actual journey that the first-person narrator, an unnamed mother, takes to Niger to visit her grown daughter, Zara, who is working at the Centre Medical in Matameye, caring for the sick, many of them starving or dehydrated children. Embedded in this journey is a preceding journey that the narrator took to Niger 17 years earlier when she and her husband, Mike, and their three daughters lived there for a year while Mike collected material for a dissertation. Haunted by these coupled visits to Africa, the narrator ends up traveling as much through its desert landscape as she does through less tangible places: time and memory; the complex links between mothers and daughters; the relationship between a mature woman and her earlier, more fearful, elusive self. Although “Still Waters in Niger” is modest in plot, it is abundant in understanding.

“What matters is continuity,” the narrator remarks of the people of Niger, “the things that bind one generation to another, whatever remains after the worst has been done.”

The same might be said of the narrator and her daughter. Continuity and the binding of generations: Whether explored in remote, exotic Niger or in the confines of family life, these are Hill’s abiding concerns in her elegantly evocative book.

DUANE’S DEPRESSED; By Larry McMurtry; Simon & Schuster: 432 pp., $26

Larry McMurtry had a well-publicized bout of depression while working on “Streets of Laredo,” the sequel to “Lonesome Dove.” Rather than write about the experience directly, as William Styron did in “Darkness Visible,” he uses it here to conclude the Thalia trilogy on an elegiac note--yet with plenty of comedy mixed in, and in prose as casual and baggy as an old pair of jeans.

Though “Duane’s Depressed” stands on its own, it helps to have read the first two novels. Once vital and lusty characters have aged into eccentrics; old feuds and love affairs have faded--and properly so, McMurtry indicates. The past is a trap. Duane’s friend and rival, Sonny Crawford, never got over local beauty Jacy Farrow; now he sits immobile in the convenience store he owns, feet blackening with gangrene. Sonny, too, is depressed--Duane starts to recognize depression everywhere. But why is he depressed, when it seems that he has successfully outrun the past?

After reading this novel, one emerges with the thought that we have got something--glimpses, here and there, of what might be wisdom. American literature has never had much truck with wisdom--only with the “road of excess” that William Blake claimed would lead us to it. So we have no end-of-road novels, excesses galore. This book is different. In its modest, ramshackle, aw-shucks way, it feels like a destination.

LAST THINGS; By Jenny Offill; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 264 pp., $23

This gem of a first novel traces a year in the life of 8-year-old Grace Davitt. She lives in a cozy house in Vermont, attended to by a baby-sitter who studies poisonous molds and by caring parents who are eager to explain the mysteries of the world to her. Her mother, Anna, is convinced that Lake Champlain is inhabited by a serpent, and her version of Natural History makes Pliny’s seem tame: She informs Grace that God was an astronaut, that the human soul is “like a worm in an apple” and that “you could fall in love with a zombie and never know until it was too late.” This last bit of information is also Anna’s assessment of her marriage to Grace’s father, an out-of-work teacher who tries to redeem himself by winning the role of TV’s “Mr. Science.” His sudden careerism and his efforts to steer Grace toward rationality earn him only Anna’s scorn, and she takes off with Grace on a cross-country road trip that, by the time it reaches the Burning Man festival, starts to look more like a kidnapping and ultimately forces Grace to make a bitter choice between survival and betrayal. Jenny Offill’s prose is exact without being fastidious, a perfect tool for marking each tiny step of Anna’s unraveling from kookiness to outright madness.

FREDY NEPTUNE; A Novel in Verse; By Les Murray; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 256 pp., $27.50

Australian poet Les Murray writes with a verse free enough not to lull you into seasickness yet strong enough to grip you in its iron meter like the claw of an Ancient Mariner and lead you at a pace somewhere between the calypso of Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” and the fox trot of Vikram Seth’s “Golden Gate.” Better still, Murray’s hero, Fredy Neptune, is enough of a Paul Bunyan to shoot a yarn while carrying both the horse and the 250-page poem on his back. Highly charged in ideas as in language, “Fredy Neptune” may jump from sin to salvation and from Suez to Sydney in a single stanza, but it is no novelty act. Neither archer nor centaur, it is a novel. And a ripping good yarn.

THE THINGS WE DO TO MAKE IT HOME; By Beverly Gologorsky; Random House: 212 pp., $22.95

This gazetteer charting the wanderings of a band of Vietnam vets and their wives, girlfriends and sisters opens on a 1973 party convened to watch the Watergate hearings on TV: Recriminations are passed as nonchalantly as a joint, and a smashed cocktail glass has the haunting ring of friendly fire. Jump-cut to the ‘90s: The handsome Rooster has gone AWOL from Millie and their resentful daughter; the hard-working Rod Devins determines to protect his family’s house from the bank by establishing an impregnable perimeter around the yard; Lucy’s Central Park South apartment is a citadel for keeping the reality of her husband’s terminal illness at bay; and Frankie still travels with his imaginary native guide, Papa San. The men talk in aphorisms: “Serious is a hole in the hourglass,” “I’m just trying my best to lighten the density.” Their language, which is left to the women to parse, is a constant, jarring reminder of the war. It is, in Beverly Gologorsky’s hands, a brilliant reflection of prevailing conditions: emotional displacements, marriage as snafu and men and women trying to find their place decades after the upheaval of Vietnam.

THE HANDYMAN; By Carolyn See; Random House: 228 pp., $22.95

Well-known for her family memoir “Dreaming,” her novels and nonfiction dealing with such well-linked subjects as drinking, dysfunction, pornography and family values, Carolyn See has reached here toward a difficult goal, to depict the formation of a great artist while not giving up her familiar gifts for dancing lightly in prose. Her tale has the form of the autobiography of a genius yet to fulfill his destiny, a “Portrait of the Artist as an Odd Job Hustler,” and she depicts him with her characteristic smart funning, her eye for quirks and jerks. Within the donnee that we are following a great artist before he becomes a great artist, a Stephen Dedalus of the freeways, See creates a series of sharp anecdotes about dysfunction, which is of course how human beings function. As a student of Southern California, See is majoring in a comedy of manners, not so much of bad manners but of the loosey-goosey manners of a certain time and place, that first American space station on Earth, Los Angeles. Her understated minor is the study of how a feeling lost soul locks into becoming a true artist with a firm vocation.

INNER CITY BLUES; By Paula L. Woods; W.W. Norton: 316 pp., $23.95

Aficionados will enjoy Paula L. Woods’ “Inner City Blues.” Woods’ detective is a feisty woman: seasoned robbery-homicide detective Charlotte Justice. Justice is black or, as she puts it with a fine sense of pigmentocratic nuance, “high yellow.” The tale Woods spins around her is as much about race and racism in L.A. as it is about crime. “Inner City Blues” unfolds in the shadow of ghetto riots complicated, as Woods nicely puts it, “by the alliance of the poor and the befuddled”: looter-shooters killing each other and their neighbors, gang members whacking their rivals while they can get away with it, the police caught in the middle and the authorities trying to drown politically explosive crimes in politically correct euphemisms. Violent, fast-paced, more twisted than a pretzel, “Inner City Blues” offers a good read laced with knowledgeable sociology.

EMPRESS OF THE SPLENDID SEASON; By Oscar Hijuelos; HarperFlamingo: 342 pp., $25

In his best novel since his Pulitzer-winning “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” (1989), Oscar Hijuelos tells the story of Lydia Espan~a, a merchant’s daughter from a Cuban seaside town who loves life just a little bit more than it deserves. Nobody writes better about sensual life than Hijuelos, and “Empress” resounds with sights, tastes, textures and even the humming ambience of deep, well-appointed brownstone apartments. It’s hard to think of a contemporary novelist who writes better about the people he knows than Hijuelos. For even when Lydia’s dreams don’t measure up to reality, Lydia always does, making this a genuinely moving novel about the greatest strength most people can hope for: the one they imagine into existence for themselves.

EVENSONG; By Gail Godwin; Ballantine: 416 pp., $25

Gail Godwin doesn’t so much write her characters’ lives as punctuate them. “Evensong” is the portrait of a marriage of two ministers in a small town in the Great Smoky Mountains. Margaret is not getting the romance or the sex from the marriage that she needs. (We have not read such a good description of that slow death since “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) The parish context is reminiscent of Anthony Trollope; characters battle the opposing forces of spirituality and society. Her sentences contain a great deal of information--sometimes a little too much is revealed all at once, spilled like the words of an unwanted companion at a bar, but prophets lurk in every corner of this very full novel.

THE WAY PEOPLE RUN; Stories By Christopher Tilghman; Random House: 210 pp., $21.95

It’s a pleasure to read fiction that reveals the interior life of a man. These stories, set in the Chesapeake Bay and the West, deal a particular hand of cards: primogeniture, cuckoldry, land and duty. As the men in these stories play their cards, they are betting with particular chips: marriage, money, career, children. “Perhaps even this second,” thinks a wealthy, elderly, lonely drunken man, “he would have to make a decision; his life was in his hands like a folded shadow, he was terrified of the dark.” All of the men in the bull’s eyes of these stories are tottering on a brink; they are afraid. Often, they fall, and for that, Christopher Tilghman has placed nets (“mercies”) beneath them. There’s a privacy in these stories--something elusive about the epiphanies that we also, perhaps erroneously, associate with men. In “The Way People Run,” a story about a man passing through the unfamiliar town his people come from, wobbling away from a failing marriage, Tilghman captures the lack of belonging a man can feel, in the home, at work, with his children, with his family. It’s heartbreaking, and it makes you want to run, too, but from them or toward them, who knows?

KA; Stories of the Mind and Gods of India; By Roberto Calasso; Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks; Alfred A. Knopf: 452 pp., $27.50

Never in the history of our reading has our own ignorance been so ruthlessly yet gracefully exposed as by Roberto Calasso’s scintillatingly challenging book, “Ka.” Its opening sentences are as startling as any in all of literature: “Suddenly an eagle darkened the sky. Its bright black, almost violet feathers made a moving curtain between cloud and earth. Hanging from its claws, likewise immense and stiff with terror, an elephant and a turtle skimmed the mountaintop. It seemed the bird meant to use the peaks as pointed knives to gut its prey.”

DREAMLAND; By Kevin Baker; HarperCollins: 520 pp., $26

Kevin Baker loves playing with history. From ever-shifting points of view and perspectives, the book follows a slew of historical and fictional figures as they move between the wonders and weirdness of Coney Island and the squalid streets, bars, tenements, opium dens and sweatshops of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Baker crams every page with impressions, textures, sights, sounds and memories. Peddlers, tailors, factory girls and rabbis cross paths with Jewish gangsters, whores, brutal cops, corrupt politicians, socialist dreamers, side-show performers and an extraordinary roster of animals--rats, horses, elephants, monkeys, chickens and even a porcupine. Each of “Dreamland’s” characters is consumed by regret and anxiety. Haunted by the voices of their fathers, plagued by their memories, doubting their courage or their wisdom, they are all pushing toward a realization of an American dream. “Dreamland’s” power comes from its breadth, its unexpected juxtapositions and the joyful accretion of one bizarre tale after another.

A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES; By Ruth Rendell; Crown: 336 pp., $24

Situated in England and spun with consummate craftsmanship, Ruth Rendell’s tale recalls the interwoven helix of DNA, whose strands are inseparable while fatidically unique. Almost all her characters are somehow impaired, emotionally handicapped, deprived or twisted or fragilized because they have been traumatized or stupefied, cocooned or ignored, have known too much excitement or none, have been starved of affection or drowned in purported care. Yet Rendell knows and lets her readers know that victimhood is not destiny: Some characters rise above trammels; others abandon themselves or choke on them. Critically injured by a brutal experience in her childhood, Rendell’s heroine is an attractive young woman, a little lacking in the preservative asperities that keep wolves from the door but otherwise engaging. Affective deprivation, on the other hand, produces a morally autistic antihero devoid of any sentiments except the most self-serving. These two, and the characters that revolve around them, are presented as multidimensional, often irritating but seldom predictable and never flat or boring. It is a tribute to psychological integrity and to a style that is true to life that when the handsome amoral killer falls down a self-dug trap and quietly dies there, as monsters sometimes do in fairy tales, we accept the resolution as realistic. A satisfying and compelling read.

EAST BAY GREASE; By Eric Miles Williamson; Picador: 248 pp., $23

Things have a way of going awry for T-Bird Murphy, the young hero of Eric Miles Williamson’s fiercely comic first novel, which is set in Oakland in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He’s raised by a mother who is unaccountably fond of the Hell’s Angels; while the bikers are given the run of the house (fully equipped with a 10-nosed hookah), T-Bird is held to another standard: As punishment for munching a P.B.J. between meals, his mother irons his hands. T-Bird goes to live in a trailer behind a gas station with his ex-con father, once a promising trumpeter and now a grease monkey striving to keep T-Bird in line. T-Bird learns how to change oil and, more important, how to get even, but his bad luck and poor judgment continue to dog him: When he steals his best friend’s baseball cards, his shame-faced attempts to return them are derailed; when the school jazz band has the opportunity to win a competition in Reno, T-Bird, the lead trumpet, is, hilariously, too hung-over to play. But it’s his father’s overdeveloped sense of payback that ignites a savage feud with a Mexican family, allowing deeper tragedies to unfold in this rough-and-tumble debut.

DOGFIGHT; And Other Stories; By Michael Knight; Plume: 162 pp., $11.95 paper

These are 10 stories, cut like gems from American family life--polished by editors at such eminent journals as The Paris Review and Blue Penny Quarterly--by a new storyteller in this first collection. And Michael Knight is purely American in his choice of ingredients (the broken family pact, the censor of neighbors, the good and bad brothers) and a touch Southern in his intonation. His stories have a gracious patina and a drawl of violence; his stories emphasize the pivotal moment, the moral moment, the decisive moment. Almost all contain dogs: wished for, missed, fought over, loved more truly than wives, brothers, girlfriends or parents. As for human love, it takes, in these stories, an astonishing variety of forms.

THE METAPHYSICAL TOUCH; By Sylvia Brownrigg; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 390 pp., $24

It’s tempting to think of Sylvia Brownrigg’s debut as an art-house “You’ve Got Mail” between two covers. But though the popular film about Internet romance assured us that e-mail didn’t really change things much after all (the ways of the heart being, essentially, immutable), one gets a much scarier vibe from “The Metaphysical Touch”: Brownrigg’s brainy epistolary duo--a grad student named Pi and a suicidal Web celebrity named JD--mull over the new medium until it really does seem like a seismic event leading us all into unexplored emotional realms. Pi’s full name is Emily Piper; she’s a budding philosopher who lost everything in the Oakland Hills fire of 1991. Rather than reassemble her dissertation on Kant from memory, Pi opts to exile herself in Mendocino. From this idyllic remove, she goes online and encounters JD’s postings from the edge, known as “The Diery.” The two begin a cyber flirtation that encompasses Kant, Kafka, bisexuality, bi-coastalism, deceased pets, the Beatles and suicide, and which eventually brings them into another real California disaster: the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Brownrigg is dead on about e-mail’s ability to seduce us into soliloquy, and her novel is a convincing meditation on the thorny neither / nor-ness of the Web: “neither voice nor paper,” as Pi muses, “neither pure mind nor pure matter.”

CARACOL BEACH; By Eliseo Alberto; Santillana USA: 368 pp., $11.95 paper

“Caracol Beach” offers the classic structure of tragic drama. It tells us that there is no perfect link between cause and effect. There are fewer pages more terrible and terrifying in modern Latin American literature than these: A tragedy in salsa, a black psalmody by the seaside, in a world not futuristic but cheerfully denying itself a future so that luxury high-rises on the beach can quickly be substituted by new constructions. The supermarkets, the superhighways, the super Muzak, all the paraphernalia of a cheerful world, a world destined to be happy forever if its possessions--including fame--last no longer than Warhol’s classic 15 minutes. Sophocles with a surfboard. Condorcet with Coca-Cola. The Enlightenment with neon lights. Once more, the orphan modernity of Latin America: “Caracol Beach” from the baroque to the barrocanroll. This is the happy world destroyed by the straying incarnations of madness, chance, remorse, revolutionary frustration, a pulverized tradition, the will to death, the hunger for suicide, the tragic misfortune.

WHITE OLEANDER; By Janet Fitch; Little, Brown: 390 pp., $24

Janet Fitch’s debut is a ferocious, risk-loving novel about a teenage girl’s tour of duty through a series of Los Angeles foster homes. The hero and narrator is Astrid Magnussen, who, at age 12, is wholly devoted to her mother, Ingrid, a minor-league poet given to hyperbole: “The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness,” she says of her work at a tiny film magazine and hates it; she hates men, too, and earns a life sentence in prison after poisoning her goat-like boyfriend. (She eventually becomes a cult hero.) Meanwhile, the orphaned Astrid embarks on a five-year journey through foster care that makes for a harrowing L.A. travelogue: There’s the trailer with an ex-stripper Jesus-freak and her quiet, sensitive, pedophile boyfriend; the turquoise tract home full of racist suburbanites; the Hollywood bungalow with a meek, wilting actress; and the Chavez Ravine hovel with a loose-living Russian emigre. Each relocation heightens Astrid’s bitterness toward her mother yet reaffirms their distant but unbreakable bond. This achy ambivalence--which Fitch refuses to resolve--gives Astrid a curious wisdom that powers this intimate and epic novel.

THE GIRLS; By Helen Yglesias; Delphinium: 214 pp., $19

If they were not so commonplace, the various physical and mental transformations that accompany old age--wrinkled skin, gray hair, baldness, lost teeth, fragile bones, rigid joints, forgetfulness--might well strike us as some kind of gruesome gimmick straight out of a horror film. The problems of old age seem “normal.” But merely because something is normal, like death, does not mean it is desirable. Four sisters in their 80s and 90s are the “girls” of Helen Yglesias’ grimly comic novel. Each of the sisters is clearly a formidable woman. What we are told of their various histories rings true. “The Girls” is a tough-minded, quietly affecting portrait of four women--not hags, not crones but ordinary Jewish American ladies--facing the end of life with a courageous blend of defiance and resignation.

THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT; By Steve Erickson; Bard: 260 pp., $23

On Davenhall Island in Northern California in 1999, a girl named Kristin runs away from home, becoming a memory girl (listening to male clients tell their life stories) in Tokyo. When her elderly client dies, she tells her story while waiting for the undertaker. Kristin tells of her escape from the mass suicide of 2,000 people on Davenhall Island, of answering an ad in L.A. that took her into the orbit of a paranoid obsessive recluse, the Occupant, her escape from him and her subsequent adventures. Characters move in concentric orbits like electrons, sometimes sprung from their paths to enter another generation, past or future. Steve Erickson is a master describer of cities, especially L.A., and a dizzying rewriter of history, myth and apocalypse. In Erickson’s universe, entire cities, entire cultures go insane all at once. From the ruins, the author creates a new tribe, a new kinship map and a strange new world for his characters to enter into, reunited, close to whole. For all the noir, the spinning hands of clocks, history’s grim calendar, there are more births than deaths in “The Sea Came in at Midnight.” One starts out sore afraid, running to keep up with a wild pack of characters, and ends calm and clear, ready for the millennium.

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN; By J.K. Rowling; Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic: 342 pp., $17.95

“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” is a wonderful sequel, as suspenseful, charming and ultimately satisfying as its two predecessors. J.K. Rowling, in the cafes of Edinburgh where she mapped out the Harry Potter series--which will feature seven books--detonates secret mines planted in the first books and sets new ones for future discovery.

The humor continues to delight--with new buffoonish characters. But surely there must be more than suspense, charm and satisfaction to the secret ingredient that has made Harry Potter so popular among children and adults alike, the Austin Powers of the bestseller book list. Not even A.A. Milne posted these kinds of numbers. T.S. Eliot had to wait until Andrew Lloyd Webber came along to provoke this kind of frenzy. Rowling, an unassuming divorced mother of a young girl, had never published a book until “The Sorcerer’s Stone.” But in birthing Harry Potter, she unleashed a character who is already sailing up into the pantheon of children’s heroes, next to the airborne Peter Pan and the umbrella-ed Mary Poppins. Harry Potter is a boy who, despite the physical and emotional trials of his childhood, has kept his good nature. He is a child who, on discovering that he is a wizard, reacts with the joy of all children that the young Louisa of “Fantasticks” fame cried so well: “I’m special, I’m special. Please God, don’t let me be normal.”

And despite these virtues, Harry Potter never gloats. No, J.K. Rowling is no Roald Dahl. She is an original, who has ingested thoroughly the culture of her youth--the “Wizard of Oz” and “Tales of Narnia,” the “Star Wars” movies and the E. Nesbit “Railway Children” adventures, the Cinderellas, Aladdins and A Thousand and One other visions--and, like the grown-up Wendy Darling that she is, has created a nursery universe with an innate sense of what a bedtime story should be. More than that, Rowling has bottled the spirit of longing for a childhood as distant as Dorothy’s black-and-white Kansas, torn away by the twisters of growing up.

Even if English muffins are the closest you’ve come to the world of Harry Potter, there is a madeleine of memory in the pages of these books powerful enough to transport all of us back to the fragility of childhood.

THE CELESTINA; A Fifteenth-Century Spanish Novel in Dialogue; By Fernando de Rojas; Translated from the Spanish by Lesley Byrd Simpson; University of California Press: 162 pp., $11.95 paper

The celebration by the Town Hall of LaPuebla de Montalban of the fifth centenary of the anonymous publication in Burgos, Spain, of the first 16 acts of what would soon be known as the “Comedy” and then as the “Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea” (and sometimes called “The Spanish Bawd” or, more simply, “The Celestina”) commemorates the birth of a work crucial to the development and flowering of Spanish literature and language: A voice burst on the scene, unique in its lucid pessimism, corrosively destructive of consecrated values (with a loyalty to the author’s personal ethics) and unprecedented in the medieval literary canon, a voice that decisively influenced the creation of the skeptical Hispanic genre of the picaresque and Cervantes’ own genial inventions.

Fernando de Rojas’ onslaught on the social conventions and codes of his day are expressed in corrosive language in which the virulence of the attack is expressed in terms we feel and experience as our own. Rojas plays masterfully with different registers of speech, verges on sublime obscenity, decants crudity, vertiginously accelerates the pace, threads arguments and phrases like beads or pearls, harries, hustles and converts verbal matter into a vibrantly alive organism.

DEAD PHILADELPHIANS; By Frank Frost; Capra Press: 340 pp., $14.95 paper

Good action thrillers are extremely rare, and there’s no formula guaranteeing their success. Still, cinecamera-ready copy, what made the novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler so memorably filmable, certainly doesn’t hurt, and Frank Frost delivers this in spades, laced with a sly and attractive line in allusion and parody. “Dead Philadelphians” is written in wonderfully taut, flexible prose: fast-moving, not a word wasted, always conscious of rhythm, powerfully evocative. Another factor contributing to the remarkable success of this first novel is the gritty and physical accuracy of detail on everything from prison life to Greek honor feuds, Berlin skinheads and the polite hypocrisies of Zurich bankers. The result is a compulsive page-turner that kept us up till the small hours. Welcome to an exciting new thriller writer.

THE LAZARUS RUMBA; By Ernesto Mestre; Picador USA: 488 pp., $27.50

“The Lazarus Rumba” is a wonderful first novel of literary indulgence, lusty digression and vulgar excursion worthy of our best-known Latin American fabulists. With a fresh imagination and a command of the mischief words can create, Ernesto Mestre deals with deadly serious themes even as his style draws on fable and fancy.

The story’s contours curve back to early Batista years, sweep deep into the Castro regime and follow the episodic lives of Alicia; her husband Julio, a comrade of Fidel’s in the Sierra Maestra and afterward opposed to the regime, beliefs for which he dies; her incestuous trapeze artist twin cousins Hector and Juanito; El Rubio, the increasingly obscene police chief of Guantanamo City who imprisons Alicia for, among other crimes, trafficking in Lewis Carroll; Atila, a blue-plumed bisexual rooster who lives to 100 and who listened to Verdi operas and the tender verses of Jose Marti as a young cock; Alicia’s falcon-legged bathtub, carried cross-country a few times, once used by Fidel during the revolution as he reread Dostoevsky; Gonzalo, a padre to whom God complains, “Am I a handyman? . . . Someone to tighten every leaky tear duct, unstop every clogged heart, straighten every crossed nerve . . . free of charge, a gift?”; and many more whose entrances and exits are so natural that rather than crowd the stage, they simply give it more color. It is Mestre’s inventive extravagance that sets this book apart from others, whether it’s El Rubio’s supper menu (pork brains au beurre noir, veal hearts stuffed with coconut shavings), his 900-year-old bull mastiff or the recipe for warding off death (17 scorpions fried in corn oil with slivers of bonest root) or a father come back from the dead to visit the living: “No one ever thinks to furnish the dead with a nice pair of sunglasses, but all this glorious light does really get annoying after a while.” At one point a record of Beethoven endlessly skips on the phonograph: “O, if Beethoven knew what a marvelous rumba he had wedged between two notes!”

Full of both hetero- and homo-eroticism--far more the latter than the former--”The Lazarus Rumba” bristles with edgy lasciviousness and nourishing gusto. Readers frustrated over the years at the poor selection of anti-Castro fiction can now claim “The Lazarus Rumba” as the great gusano novel.

CLOSE RANGE; Wyoming Stories; By Annie Proulx; Scribner: 286 pp., $25

Desiccated (not even bloody), mean, wary, these Wyoming stories require all five senses. You have to read them as though you were a mangy, warty, desperate desert animal whose life depended on the information they contained. You can’t just expect to pick them up and put them down: You have to scramble. Annie Proulx, who has made some of us laugh and some of us cry with her prizewinning fiction, has an alarming amount in common with the late writer Ted Hughes--in whose work the very survival of the subconscious is at stake. And when you finally rest, your knuckles perhaps bloodied, you see in these stories a life that is fragile and subtle, much like cactuses and desert flowers--never mind that the language bumps and grinds and rumbles and skews your understanding of the world. In “The Half-Skinned Steer,” a man returns to the ranch he grew up on. In “The Mud Below,” a short man becomes a rodeo rider. In “The Blood Bay,” a cowboy saws the boots off a frozen corpse. These are the bones. Here’s some of the flesh: “He knew he was getting down the page and into the fine print of this way of living. . . . All around him wild things were falling to earth.” His eyes moved “over her like an iron over a shirt.” As for the breath, well, Proulx must go into a trance and collect it herself, a voodoo she does, like the great literary shamans.

ANOTHER WORLD; By Pat Barker; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 278 pp., $24

The containers of memory are emptying. For those of us born at the tail end of the baby boom, it is impossible not to be conscious of the fact that the eyeballs that looked on the events of World War II are slowly clouding with age. Our fathers, our uncles, their friends, soldiers and sailors, survivors of the Holocaust, all before too many years will no longer be among us to communicate what they have witnessed and what they have lived and how (with regard to the survivors in particular) they have endured. The firsthand account, with its throb of Scheherazade urgency, will soon disappear into the archiving embrace of history. History is indispensable, but it does not have quite the magic, or mystery, of sitting at the feet of a man or a woman who was there. If World War II is withdrawing into these fogs, then World War I has nearly vanished. How many people are living and cogent today who fought at the Somme, the Marne, Ypres? The loss of direct experience--and how memory shapes and remakes this experience--is a matter that has concerned and inspired Pat Barker in four novels to date, beginning with “Regeneration,” continuing with “The Eye in the Door” and “The Ghost Road” (all later grouped as “The Regeneration Trilogy”) and advancing still further in her latest book, “Another World.” In spare, rapidly moving, present-tense prose, Barker gives us family life straight up. There is not a smudge of sentimentality, not a single decorative arabesque. But there is humor. In the finest parts of “Another World,” as in “The Regeneration Trilogy,” Barker succeeds in thus humbling her readers. Her remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century’s often bleak and undignified human record.

CARTER CLAY; By Elizabeth Evans; HarperCollins: 404 pp., $24

Thrillers make life seem shorter than it really is. Your heart beats fast, everything collapses into good and evil or a single act and the ensuing guilt, fear and possible redemption. Things get really ugly when carefully constructed lives turn suddenly, falling prey to accidents or intentions: comets and falling rocks or murderers. Carter Clay, Vietnam vet, alcoholic, driving one night with a drinking buddy who, years before in less happy times, tried to kill him, hits a family on their way to visit grandma, killing the father, causing brain damage to the mother and crippling the teenage daughter. It’s hit and run but, full of guilt, Carter gets a job as an aide in the hospital where the mother is being treated. He continues to involve himself in the life of the mother and daughter but is pursued (more accurately haunted) by the twisted companion from the scene of the accident. Elizabeth Evans writes in a purposefully stuttering, confused style that effectively recreates Clay’s terrifying logic. Which is more frightening--the functioning madman who kills by accident or the cold-blooded killer? How people read these things on the beach we’ll never know.

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY; Edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison; Houghton Mifflin: 776 pp., $28

John Updike, assisted by Katrina Kenison, has produced a compendium of prize-winning stories, spanning the century and the continent, that manages to be a page-turner in its own right, beyond the value of the separate fictions gathered here. A fascinating plot runs from story to story that makes reading the book in order, with no jumps or skips, surprisingly rewarding as a meditation on this American century. The plot line is history itself, of course, the evidence year by year, decade to decade, of the life of the imagination contending with the life of the continent as it has unfolded over time, through wars, Depression and consumerism, from a lonely rural experience to a jammed urban consciousness. A wise teacher of 20th century American history might assign this anthology, story by story, as a kind of choral voice for the interior feeling of the century as it has cycled through the decades. But “themes” are not the point of this anthology. The real pleasure--and instruction--of reading the stories in chronological order is to follow the changing American voice across time.

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.

JUNETEENTH; By Ralph Ellison; Random House: 354 pp., $25

“History has put to us three fatal questions, has written them across our sky in accents of accusation,” Sen. Adam Sunraider shouts from the well of the Senate in Ralph Ellison’s posthumous “Juneteenth.” “They are, How can the many be as one? How can the future deny the Past? And How can the light deny the dark?” The year is 1955, and the “us” that the senator refers to is the American people. And the three questions the senator asks can be lumped under the great American rubric of Race. The answer the senator gives is as paradoxically Orwellian as it is American--”In dark days look steadily on the darker side, for there is where brightness sometimes hides itself.” And it is doubly provocative--for Sen. Sunraider, although he represents one of the states of New England, has a national reputation as a race-baiter, an implacable foe to black man, woman and child. Nevertheless, his answer to the three fatal questions is the key to “Juneteenth,” a book that threatens to come as close as any since “Huckleberry Finn” to grabbing the ring of the Great American Novel.

EVERY DEAD THING; By John Connolly; Simon & Schuster: 396 pp., $25

Born round the mid-19th century, detective stories replaced the deteriorating magic of the supernatural. Witchcraft, spells, ghosts and fairies were fading. Crime stories re-created mystery when mystery was waning: The dark forests of robbers and witches gave way to the somber thickets of criminal souls, the exoticism of unexplored wastes translated into the hunting grounds of native ogres. John Connolly provides ogres aplenty. And witches, too. Gripping is a word that should be used sparingly. But Connolly’s first novel is a spellbinding book. Informed but uncluttered, it holds the reader fast in a comfortless stranglehold. “Every Dead Thing” is a tale of carnage and pursuit: of a demented and sadistic killer inflicting pain and fear, his trail of flayed and dissected corpses, the hurt and rage that he leaves behind; and of the retired NYPD detective who is his victim and his nemesis. Chock-full with local color, art history, travel notes, love and love lost, friendship and friends betrayed, gangsters good and bad, cops idem and many eloquent horrors, the plot ranges from Maine to Cajun Country, from Manhattan to New Orleans, distempering all it touches with malaise. As in real life, death brings no resolution, only grief. And a question: Why must nice characters hurt when evil ones die by their hand?

L.A. BREAKDOWN; By Lou Mathews; The British Book Co.: 252 pp., $24.95

Lou Mathews, a veteran journalist and editor, has written an understated novel that deftly captures the mood of mid-’60s Los Angeles and the waning days of one of its signature subcultures: drag racing. His hero is Fat Charlie, an innocuous busybody who likes to hang out at Van de Kamp’s drive-in, where the local racing talent congregates. Charlie doesn’t have the chops or the engine to compete for “Legend” status, but he “starts races, holds bets, runs errands and occasionally sells car parts that aren’t too difficult to steal.” He’s a go-between among the regulars at Van de Kamp’s: Vaca, an odious wheel chair-bound racing nut; Brody, Vaca’s hard-drinking driver; Reinhard, their cool, alimony-owing rival; Lamont, a dopey kid with a crappy home life; and Connie, a sassy, rail-thin girl whom Charlie can’t stop thinking about. Like so many tales of this thoroughly mined era, “L.A. Breakdown” moves ineluctably toward both the loss of innocence and the recruitment center: The shadow of Vietnam is, understandably, ever present. But Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil.

LOVERS FOR A DAY; New and Collected Stories; By Ivan Klima; Grove Press: 230 pp.; $24

Ivan Klima’s latest book, “Lovers for a Day,” passes from the early 1960s through the brief radiance of the Prague Spring of 1969 to the bruising disappointment of the following two decades and into the uncertain light of the 1990s. And perhaps it would surprise no one to conclude that the early stories--stories of waiting--are the true gems of the collection, sparkling introductions to yet another Czech genius produced by the crush of Hapsburgs and Stalins.

LOUSE; By David Grand; Arcade: 272 pp., $23.95

This is the astonishingly odd tale of Herman Q. Louse, “future trustee” in the “resort town of G.” and valet to Herbert Horatio Blackwell, the resort’s visionary creator and Executive Controlling Partner. Control is the key word, as G., a popular casino, is also a hermetic dystopia of surveillance cameras, strict sterilization regimes, pharmaceutical abuse and gray-flannelled attendants with names like Venison, Blurd and, most mysterious, Blank. All of them, like Louse, have been ensnared by gambling debts into a bewilderingly structured--and frighteningly corporate--indentured servitude. Louse’s particular duty is injecting Blackwell--known as Poppy--with Librium; like Howard Hughes, Poppy is a former aviation and film pioneer who’s now a grizzled invalid loaded with all the options: germ phobia, a paper airplane collection, an Oedipus complex. When Louse is caught humming (an unsanctioned exercise of free will), his debt is increased and he’s sent to Lounge 18 SR-5 to blow off steam in total darkness with an unidentifiable woman; she slips Louse a document that pulls him--whoever he actually is--into a conspiracy so twisted it makes “The Prisoner” look tame. David Grand’s debut is creepy, poetic and funny; like G., it exerts a hold as undeniable as it is indecipherable.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA; By Stendhal; Translated from the French by Richard Howard; Illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker; The Modern Library: 508 pp., $24.95

“The Charterhouse of Parma” has never sparkled in English with such radiance as it does in Richard Howard’s new translation. One could say that Howard has removed layers of grime from a masterpiece--except that the effect is more musical than visual. For Stendhal combines Mozart’s brio with Mozart’s tender pathos, and it is this range that Howard has so masterfully re-created in our language. French, compared to English, has a smaller vocabulary--for our full complement of “glower,” “glance” and “glimpse,” French has only regarder with an assortment of adverbs that follow it as limp afterthoughts. For our “glow,” “glimmer” and “gleam,” French has only briller. But where French gains in suppleness and elegance (if not always in concreteness) is in the language of courtliness and the complexity of word order and grammar, and it is this richness that Howard, a prizewinning poet, commands so fully in English and is able to work out with such aristocratic lightness of touch.

ZWILLING’S DREAM; By Ross Feld; Counterpoint: 228 pp.; $25

Picasso once called for the authentic modern work of art to be “a sum of destructions,” a prescription that Ross Feld’s fourth novel fills to a . . . D: Divorce, disease, death and depression pervade this ironic comedy of derangement in decisive detail, and whenever the author feels the tempo of his depredations lagging, he rakes characters out of the narrative embers as enthusiastically as Dickens used to toss them on. The effect is the same, a kind of writerly exuberance capering around the pyre of defection, as when Zwilling refers to “my stinginess with chaos. (How could anyone but me be worthy of it?).” But for all the eponymous dream’s (the nightmare’s) comic gusto, in which urban Jewish speech is mined for its latest, most laughable distortions, it is not Dickens but the Russian novelists whom Feld so appositely invokes--Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky are cited with cunning allusive emphasis, and Chekhov would have delightedly acknowledged a tale on the first page of which “we seem to stand bewildered in the shallows of death” and in whose last chapter all the (surviving) characters convene at a superbly orchestrated funeral, exalted to a kind of mortal illumination by the erasures and scarifications they have confronted throughout, bewildered indeed.

For all of Feld’s references to European literature and his resort to the most sophisticated structures of modern fiction, his fourth novel is a powerfully American story, charged with a curious sense of the anthematic: The cars and the drinks, the cities, the travel between them, the very complaints and afflictions of the bodies so dramatically sacrificed strike us as representative of the way we live now, the way we suffer, the way we die--as the author says in his last words, “letting Zwilling pass.”

SINATRALAND; By Sam Kashner; The Overlook Press: 192 pp., $22.95

First the Sands, and then you, Frank; seems like everything good in this mixed-up world is checking out at the same time. If you were still around, I wonder what you’d make of this book by the Kashner kid. If you ask me, I think the guy writes about as good as you paint, Francis, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It’s about Finkie Finkelstein, the guy who wrote you all those unanswered letters for so many years. You remember him, don’t you Frank? He represented the Weiss & Rifkind window-shade company, and he owned the biggest house in Fort Lee, the one that once belonged to Buddy Hackett. The guy was nuts about you, Frank; he and his first wife, Jill, named their daughter Nancy Ava, after your first two ex-wives, and he once told you that “Mr. William Shakespeare doesn’t deserve to carry your jockstrap.” I swear, the guy’s funnier than Joey Bishop sometimes. But seriously, Francis, Finkie’s got a point when he talks about what your boys did to him backstage after one of your farewell performances. That wasn’t very nice, and you can quote me, but I was truly touched when, after Finkie regained the ability to walk, you brought him into your inner circle. That, Francis, is what class is all about, and Sam Kashner’s got it all here in this little book. If you were still with us, Frank, you’d sleep the sleep of kings knowing that the art of book writing is safe in his hands.

INTERPRETER OF MALADIES; Stories By Jhumpa Lahiri; Mariner: 208 pp., $12 paper

In “The Third and Final Continent,” the closing story in this stunning debut collection, a Bengali man, after spending the last 30 years in the impossibly strange land of America, finds himself “bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.” A similar sense of bewilderment pervades these pages, as Jhumpa Lahiri’s displaced Indian men and women are continually challenged to cope with new forms of everyday life and with each other, which they do with comical pragmatism, hard-headedness and bitter honesty. The newlyweds in “This Blessed House” find themselves at loggerheads over what to do with the unlikely trove of Christian paraphernalia they uncover in their new Connecticut home; in “Mrs. Sen’s,” a recently emigrated wife is determined to buy fresh fish with their heads on, even if it means tackling her crippling fear of American roads; in “A Temporary Matter,” a young couple take the opportunity of nightly power outages to tell each other horrible secrets in the dark; and in “Interpreter of Maladies,” an attractive American Indian tourist blithely confesses her marital infidelity to an astonished tour guide at the Sun Temple at Konarak. Lahiri’s touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies.

FLEUR DE LEIGH’S LIFE OF CRIME; By Diane Leslie; Simon & Schuster: 302 pp., $23

Diane Leslie’s debut, about a girl with the improbable name of Fleur de Leigh, is a winning evocation of Beverly Hills in the ‘50s. Amid this gilded wonderland, Fleur is a sort of precocious show-biz Eloise; she is as independent as she is innocent, a condition imposed upon her by her aloof parents: Charmian, the insouciant star of “The Charmian Leigh Radio Mystery Hour” and speaker of fluent Franglais; and Maurice, the producer of the hilariously cruel television game show “Sink or Get Rich.” As imposing as this duo is (their self-regard rivals that of Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir), Fleur’s upbringing is left to the relative strangers who drift into--and out of--the Leighs’ mansion. There’s Glendora, the voluptuous nanny whose engagement to a strong silent cop is derailed by Charmian’s sexual imperialism; Miss Hoate, another nanny, who is convinced that chenille bedspreads pose a health risk; Gilda, who runs a psychodrama workshop for the pre-pubescent overstimulated youth of Hollywood; and Thea Roy, a legend of the silent era who comes to roost chez Leigh at the end of her life. Leslie reveals a world that’s as shiny and as frozen as a game-show host’s smile and a little girl who navigates it with heartening savvy.

HAVING EVERYTHING; By John L’Heureux; Atlantic Monthly Press: 230 pp., $24

“Having Everything” is a gracefully written, painfully familiar look at adulthood. The writing is so sharp and clear, in fact, that “Having Everything” is an Andrew Wyeth painting of a novel, in which every gesture, every blade of grass cuts through to some emotion, traveling a distance from skin to heart that could exist only after at least four decades of life, like a complete molecule with all eight rings from its nucleus to its outer shell and no need to bond.

WHEN WE WERE WOLVES; Stories By Jon Billman; Random House: 230 pp., $21.95

These stories, set in the American West (Utah, Wyoming and South Dakota) are not so much about how to live, as many stories are, as about what to put up with and what to refuse. Characters in the collection, dog mushers and firefighters (the author is himself a firefighter) don’t have a whole lot of time for navel gazing. They negotiate weather and money and wild animals and Freemasons and Mormons in their daily lives, and with