DISCOVERIES

ESPERANZA’S BOX OF SAINTS; By Maria Amparo Escandon; (Scribner: 248 pp., $12 paper)

San Judas Tradeo, patron saint of housewives, first appears to Esperanza in her oven door on the day of her daughter’s funeral. “Your daughter is not dead,” he tells her, whereupon Esperanza rushes out the door to find her Blanca. The novel is written very much in the style of “Like Water for Chocolate,” though Esperanza resembles Lucy Ricardo more than any of the characters in Laura Esquivel’s book. Esperanza is certain that Blanca has been kidnapped and sold into prostitution. Carrying a cardboard box of saints, she travels to the Pink Palace in Tijuana and the Fiesta Theatre in Los Angeles and works as a prostitute while looking for Blanca. But she does not find her daughter until the end, when San Judas appears again to say that she never let him finish his sentence. Blanca, he tells her, is trapped between the world of the living and the world of the dead, kind of like little Ricky.

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD; By Laura Kasischke; (Hyperion: 226 pp., $22.95)

“White Bird in a Blizzard” is a bloody book, punctuated with red adjectives, flayed things and bits of meat dangling between the teeth of Kasischke’s characters. For the rest, it’s all burbs, burbs and more burbs; more childhood road kill left on the side of the freeway by the American middle class, with its alcohol and jealous husbands and a lack of sex. “White Bird” resembles Rick Moody’s “The Ice Storm”: stark images engraved in adolescent consciousness, in author’s memory. The novel’s narrator, Katrina, describes a father who grew up “without wildlife” and a mother who is always cleaning and who disappears when Katrina is 16. What Kasischke brings to this set is a poet’s language: a boyfriend’s bare feet, “raw on the beige carpet as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled,” a mother at the end of the day when everyone gets home, “rising to the surface of her life like a sick aquarium fish,” a father passing the butter at the dinner table to her mother, “as if he wished it could be more.” All this foreshadowing can make a reader tense, as if Kasischke were a pale swimmer under the thin ice we all skate on. We dread the revelations that will be her salvation.

WHAT THE TWILIGHT SAYS; By Derek Walcott; (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 246 pp., $23)

“Both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom,” writes Walcott of his childhood and education in St. Lucia, “hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began.” Therein lies the force of Walcott’s creation--poetry, plays, essays: elation and ambition. These essays reveal a spine, a sine curve of energy and exhaustion, exposing the sources of his bitterness (race) and of his desire (poetry). Walcott describes his struggle with race: “that wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to escape,” and his transcendence of that struggle: “[O]nce we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers.” And in a million ways, he describes his love of poetry: “There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life.” The essays on fellow writers--Robert Lowell (“He had married often but his muse was not widowed”), Ted Hughes (“the malicious midden that is in Ted Hughes”), V.S. Naipaul (the damning comment: “Trinidad injured him. England saves him”) and others--reveal a talent for king-making more reminiscent of Shakespeare than any other living writer. Walcott could reconfigure the cells in a human body with his pen.

DREAMING SOUTHERN; By Linda Bruckheimer; (Dutton: 264 pp., $23.95)

Mothers hitting the road in Pontiacs, dragging their kids around and heading for another state (usually California) have always given me the willies. Mona Simpson (“Anywhere But Here”) did it; Tobias Wolfe (“This Boy’s Life”) did it. In Linda Bruckheimer’s version, a zany Southerner, Kentucky-born Lila Mae Wooten, moves her four children (ages 16, 12, 6 and an infant) from Kentucky to California. Her husband has gone ahead, and rather than take the three days he suggests for the drive, Lila Mae is determined to take scenic Route 66, even if it takes several months. On the way to the Grand Canyon, Lila Mae takes pity on Juanita Featherhorse and her pyromaniac son, Benny. Like most of Lila Mae’s good deeds, this leads to trouble, but Lila Mae seems to save everyone around her just by believing in them.

THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION; By Maeve Brennan; (Mariner Books: 358 pp., $13)

Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin and came to the United States in 1934 with her family. Her father was appointed the Republic of Ireland’s first envoy to Washington. William Shawn hired her at the New Yorker in 1953, first to write about fashion, then short book reviews, then occasional features and finally a column of her own--letters from the long-winded lady, as she came to be known--short pieces about New York. She wrote these for 15 years, along with some of the finest short stories in English, many about her native Dublin. Many of the stories in “The Springs of Affection” are about Rose and Hubert Derdon and their sad marriage in Dublin in a home that very much resemble the one Brennan grew up in. Her pictures of Dublin have the same observant chattiness of her Talk of the Town pieces and all the empathy for lives that, by their very ordinariness, leave ruts in city streets.

WAITING TO FLY; By Ron Naveen; (William Morrow: 370 pp., $26)

Nobody doesn’t love them. Yet few people would take their obsession to Antarctica to live among them. Naveen counts penguins for a living. Climax for Naveen is getting aboard a research vessel that makes a detour to the Weddell Sea. Bliss is the constant noise of a hundred curious penguins. Loneliness is life without penguins. Of a particular flock he has not visited in a while he wonders: “Have the males made it back to the little pebble nests that served as home last season? . . . Will they divorce? Do chinstraps have affairs?” Gentoo chicks, penguins who resemble Zubin Mehta, Adelies on the first incubation shift and, once in a great while, a human who shares his passion--these are the characters that live in “Waiting to Fly.”