Discoveries

IN CONCERT PERFORMANCE

By Nikolai Dezhnev

Doubleday: 270 pp., $23.95

American fiction is hyper-realistic in comparison to the rest of the world’s fiction, in which characters routinely fall in and out of tense and dimension. We tend to leave this kind of imaginative exercise for the science fiction writers. Our housewives suffer romantic neglect, our detectives use real bullets. Good and evil almost always assume human form.

Of course it has not always been this way. From Poe to Pynchon there are exceptions in American literature. But as readers we are out of the habit of surrealism, even magical realism, a kind of reading that takes a little more attention. Because the universe in magical novels is so expanded, its walls burst more easily. “In Concert Performance” is Russian writer Nikolai Dezhnev’s slightly heavy-handed story of the forces of darkness battling for power in modern Moscow. It is a mosaic of philosophy (from Descartes to Karma), politics (“Who would want to be thought crazy,” a night guard thinks to himself, “in a society that does not openly admit its own madness?”) and surrealism. In this collage, Satan, in human form, goes drinking with a physics professor and slips him a life-changing formula. A TV newscaster’s life is interrupted when a lesser prince of darkness falls in love with her. This is all reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses,” but levitation takes a lot of work, and unlike “Satanic Verses,” Dezhnev’s characters’ feet rarely touch the ground.

*

FROZEN MUSIC

By Marika Cobbold

HarperCollins:

384 pp., $24

Between Bergman and the northern lights, Scandinavian artists frequently indulge in deeply moral dilemmas or sparkling escapes into the ether. The author of “Frozen Music,” Swedish-born Marika Cobbold, however, is extremely thorough; her main characters are so completely drawn and the plot so desperately normal that when the author makes a brief magical leap in the end (a message in a bottle found by the very person it was intended for) and tries to drag us along with her, we resist like waterlogged carpets dragged out to dry in the sun.

Esther is 9 when the novel opens and 36 when it ends. For almost 400 pages we follow her very ordinary path to adulthood, her tender relationship with her mother (Daddy fades to black and finally disappears with another woman) and her eventual plummet into love with her mother’s best friend’s son, who has hovered on the periphery of her life since she was little. There’s so little friction between these wooden characters that you begin to wonder just how intentional their coldness and lack of dimension is. They are buffeted by shards of magic in the form of coincidence just like the rest of us, but when characters’ feet never leave the ground, it’s hard to believe they can fly.

*

DESPAIR

And Other Stories

By Andre Alexis

Henry Holt: 212 pp., $23

“She told everything to the garden,” writes Andre Alexis, who was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada, in the story titled: “Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa.” “That’s how I heard the story. A curse on anyone who reads this.” The sliver of fear a reader feels is testimony to the fact that Alexis crosses some line between storytelling and incantation, in which the teller implicates the reader in the weaving of his spells. These voodoo-wallah stories are frightening, especially “Night Pieces,” in which a young man is haunted each night by a soucouyant, a form of succubus.

In this and other stories, haunting and its characteristic paranoia are contagious: You can be haunted by reading about a haunting or hearing a story about one. In many of Alexis’ characters, the soul is somehow forced from the body using magic of an everyday sort: spells and witchcraft, not time travel or transmutation.

*

MY MOVIE BUSINESS

A Memoir

By John Irving

Random House: 170 pp., $19.95

John Irving has so much control over his writing, fiction or memoir that it’s always a wonder he lets any magic in at all; it’s a blessing he hasn’t strangled all his characters like over-disciplined adolescents whose parents insist they go to Harvard. But no, an epic writer, Irving creates worlds that have several atmospheres. His magic takes the form of grace and of comedy--the absurdity of situations and, ironically, the backlash of our most decisive movements.

Books on the difference between movies and novels are almost always muddle-headed, dreary and bitter. Not “My Movie Business.” Irving spells out the pitfalls without rancor (mainly because whether the movies made from his novels were successful or not does not enter into his discussion): “There is less time for character development in a film than a novel; a character’s eccentricities can too easily become the character,” and “in the movies, what people look like truly matters.” In the end, it is the difficult process of condensation involved in making a screenplay (“Cider House Rules” was 800 pages, the screenplay was 136) that most threatens the result. Irving’s biggest complaint is that in movies, the money people think “they have an unassailable right to interfere with what happens in the screenplay and with the outcome of the film.” People in publishing, he points out, don’t feel they have that right. Irving is not a moviegoer, but he has wrestled the movie business to the ground and won. No small achievement.