DISCOVERIES

THE LAST LOVELY CITY; By Alice Adams; (Alfred A. Knopf: 192 pp., $22)

So often in fiction the decisions are made behind the curtain. We meet the wizard and not the ugly pulsing brain factoring risk and restlessness. When we do find a book that parses the simplest of daily moves and reveals how plaintively they add up to generations of error and calamity, we might find ourselves frustrated and bored by the pace of the story. Women’s work, this detail management. If I had made the steak instead of the chicken, would we have married? Please, not that. It’s too much to bear in real life, much more in literature.

Nevertheless, like those painters who shed light on the parsimony and defeat of domestic life, as Van Gogh does in the “Potato Eaters,” there are writers who insist their readers see each particle of dirt under the fingernails. Alice Adams’ characters are deliberate, tentative and querulous. They make their decisions on the page, and when they finally do something, it is like watching a baby walk for the first time. Unlike a baby, however, they are often too late. Adams dares, for example, to write stories about middle-aged single women obsessed with their cats and about marriages that end in divorce and, horrors, remarriage. The writing is not showy, not spectacular. The characters are ordinary, sometimes mortified. Others are poised but on a curbside brink. I admire her attention to their footsteps.

THIS PLACE YOU RETURN TO IS HOME; By Kirsty Gunn; (Atlantic Monthly Press: 208 pp., $22)

Kirsty Gunn traffics in the fears of children, and she is so good at it that a reader remembers entering roomfuls of monstrous adults, with their abrupt transitions and their sudden, inexplicable, inconstant interest--but mostly their lack of it. Gunn conveys a child’s efforts to figure out and manipulate the adults around her, to get even her simplest needs met through a combination of wit and timing. These stories are relentless, dark and sad. Where will she lead us and will we be left there? The effect of these stories and of her previous novels, “Rain” and “Keepsake,” is so devastating that one actually perks up when a character in a story is introduced with the name Carter. It seems so reliable. Carter must be capable of navigating. But when he loses his disoriented friend Sarah Jane and is calling to her from the empty house, we lose all hope. Sarah Jane “can’t leave her thin place by the trees.” In another story, when the disoriented mother takes her three children and leaves her husband, promising them a better life, they are all forced to grow up too soon. Whose fault is it? That’s the problem with Gunn’s universe; there’s never anyone to blame.

HEAVY WATER; 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.

OLD FENCES, NEW NEIGHBORS; By Peter R. Decker; (University of Arizona Press: 160 pp., $19.95)

In 1974, Peter Decker and his wife moved from New York City to the town of Ridgway, in Ouray County, Colo. They bought a cattle ranch and started branding and fencing and delivering calves, moving only reluctantly, some 20 years later, to Nebraska, where the production costs for cattle ranching were lower. This is a book about their life in Ridgway and about the West. Decker pits himself against its myths, the “stereotypes” and “romantic Hollywood claptrap” that have turned this region into a recreational playground. The real people of the West, Decker insists, were the opposite of the mythical “rugged individualists.” They were neighbors, cooperators, homesteaders. “Old Fences” is a little bit of history, a little bit of memoir but also a eulogy for this quarter of Colorado, most famously gentrified in the town of Telluride. “Today,” writes Decker, “more than half the income of Ouray County’s residents is derived from dividends, interest, rent, and transfer payments. Retirees far outnumber ranchers and their employees. There are still more cattle than people, but the ratio is lessening.”

WHILE I WAS GONE; By Sue Miller; (Alfred A. Knopf: 266 pp., $24)

After 25 years of marriage to a minister, Jo Becker, veterinarian, mother of three grown girls, suddenly spends an unhealthful, disruptive amount of time (several years) remembering the summer of 1968, when she ran away from her first marriage to a communal house of students, musicians, poverty lawyers and scientists, a house of shifting sexual alliances and deep friendships in Cambridge, Mass. Now she’s smack in the middle of her life, and she’s restless. There’s unfinished business in her memories of that summer that will not allow her to power out of the rut she’s in until she faces them. When a member of the group moves into her town, she is drawn to him as a solution for her ennui. Miller writes about that point in life when one has experienced both birth and death, enough beginnings and endings to form some conclusions about how the remaining minutes, weeks and years will best be spent. Wisdom creeps up on Miller’s characters, and they do not swoon.