DISCOVERIES

THE SEVENTEENTH CHILD; By Dorothy Marie Rice and Lucille Mabel Walthall Payne; (Linnet Books / The Shoe String Press: 102 pp., $18.50)

Here’s a true discovery--a book so utterly without and beyond artifice that it’s hard to review. These are the memories of Mabel Payne, as told over a series of Sunday afternoon visits with her daughter. Mabel was born in 1929 in Pittsylvania County, Va., to a family of sharecroppers. She was the 17th child, “the knee baby.” The children walked six miles to and from school each day. Fertilizer bags were sewn together to make bedsheets. The family’s house had two large rooms and an attic. Sister Mary was retarded and was sent away. When the boys’ socks wore out, they were used to make gloves for the smaller children. “We all used to play together, work together, the teenagers, the black and white,” writes Payne of her community, “but when time came to go to school . . . the black walked and the white rode the school buses.”

The descriptions of tobacco farming, the dinner bells ringing and the “bunion stew” that cooked all day long during curing time are deceptively lyrical, but again, these memories are beyond criticism. “As the years went on,” she writes in appreciation of her mother and the midday meal, “we never missed a dessert.” Sometimes her mother did the neighbors’ laundry and little Mabel would see her mother spit in the water. “And she would say, ‘That helps to get them clean.’ But I knew she was just so angry because she had to survive.”

ANGELS AND ALIENS; By Mary Morris; (Picador: 258 pp., $23)

The Art of Quirk. If there are family trees in literature, Mary Morris dangles on Joan Didion’s branch. Both write with more interest in irony than in truth, with more interest in juxtaposition and composition than in color or subject. In 1988 Morris fled the East Coast with a famous academic who refused to legally acknowledge paternity for their 8-month-old daughter, Kate, but wanted to keep the relationship with Morris. She accepts a temporary teaching job at UC Irvine, rents a bungalow in Irvine and completes the self-destructive cycle she seems caught in, certain that she is making the mistake of her life. She does a little freelance journalism on the side, covering such non-East Coast topics as the flying angels in the Crystal Cathedral and a UFO abductee support group. She explores the Orange County varietal of the New Age grape: rock therapy, psychic dog-finders and channelers. She takes a lot of wholesome risks, like betting in Vegas, and some unwholesome ones, like allowing el creepo to call her and plan vacations with her. She risks being in love. She fails. She goes home and writes away this chapter in her life.

THE DANGEROUS AGE; By Annette Williams Jaffee; (Leapfrog Press: 180 pp., $19.95)

“The Dangerous Age” refers to that point in a woman’s life when her children are grown, when she can finally say out loud that she is married to the wrong man and hasn’t had a fulfilling romantic relationship in well over a decade. She is a little desperate, a little sad, a little angry, a little lonely--wanting to jump ship but not sure she can swim. It’s so common it’s almost generic subject matter--a lump of clay. We wait to see which sculpture the author will fashion from it: Anna Karenina? Emma Bovary? Erica Jong? If a woman takes a risk for her own happiness, will she be happy in the end or will she be punished? If as a child you wanted to know which monsters were hiding under the bed, it won’t be hard to ignore this novel’s very plain writing to acquire another monster. The pages turn themselves.

A HARD TIME TO BE A FATHER; By Fay Weldon; (Bloomsbury: 242 pp., $23.95)

Fay Weldon isn’t having any of it, that’s for sure. These stories contain some of the angriest, most dangerous, most vengeful of women scorned by fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands and other nomads. We are talking “Daddy, daddy.” We are talking “The villagers hate you.” The characters in these stories are foosball players kicking the ball and the ball is mankind. Weldon turns the handles very fast, and she plays both sides. Her singsong style, liberally punctuated and her frequent use of the first person allow her to state the most horrible accusations, a litany of abuses that are so common they are nearly parenthetical because these characters, once they’ve kicked that ball, are moving on.

SHADOWS IN THE SUN; By Wade Davis; (Island Press: 292 pp., $23)

“The essays in this book,” writes Wade Davis, journalist, ethnobotanist, anthropologist, “are fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.” Most of these essays feature a place--Tibet, the northwest Amazon, Peru, Haiti, the Arctic, the coast of the South China Sea; a person--Olayuk Narqitarvik, an Inuit hunter, Bruno Manser, anti-lumber industry activist in the rain forests of Borneo, Daniel and his son Jesse Taylor-Ide, explorers in the Himalayas; an issue--drilling for oil and gas in Lancaster Sound, cutting down rain forest in Malaysia and developing a blight resistant strain of rubber tree. Davis drinks “jaguar’s nectar” in the Amazon, eats the San Pedro cactus in Peru and visits the magic toads in Haiti. He pleads for some places and some species but also for this life he leads--this way of learning from other cultures, by living with them and participating in their sacred lives. Oddly, it reads a little like a proposition for marriage to a reader he wants to bring along on his travels. Here are the joys; here are the hardships. Here’s why it matters.

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.