DISCOVERIES

THE BROKEN ESTATE; By James Wood; (Random House: 266 pp., $24)

We worry that our subconscious has gotten shallow, like a shrinking aquifer, and we dare not speak its language. Someone might say, “What do you mean?” and in every house but James Wood’s, we would fall through the floor, lonely, computer illiterate, old. James Wood is 34, one of the best book critics in this country and England, possessed of a towering empathy, a vital literary instinct, and a Britisher’s skepticism toward New York publishing. The darlings of that industry--the Updikes and the Roths and the Morrisons--do not impress him much.

In Wood’s school of criticism (he swims regularly in the aquifer) a reader can see profound things about the writer through the work. Wood has no qualms asserting (and he is very assertive) that Herman Melville, for example, was “tormented by God’s inscrutable silence.” He refers to the “leaping exultations” of Moby Dick, the “self-pity and self-absorption . . . that make ‘Pierre’ so intensely unlikeable a book.” He fights the tyranny of literal interpretation and reveres and transcends craft all at once, making fiction a ladder to what he calls a “special realm of freedom.” Here are some snapshots: Wood on Jane Austen: “she invented a new, rapid semaphore for signalling a person’s thought as it is happening”; on Flaubert: “his style refuses the pull of matter, asserts itself over matter”; on Chekhov: his “idea of ‘life’ is a bashful, milky complication, not a solving of things”; on Toni Morrison’s “Paradise”: “It is a novel babyishly cradled in magic . . . deeply sentimental, evasive and cloudy”; and on W.G. Sebald: “the first contemporary writer since Beckett to have found a way to protest the good government of the conventional novel form and to harass realism into a state of self-examination.”

As you might spend time with your favorite painting or animal in a museum or a zoo, find your favorite writer in this collection’s table of contents and read that essay first. You will grumble, as I did, against his authority (I didn’t feel Virginia Woolf needed James Wood’s hand up into the canon), and that is part of the fun of criticism. Wood shows the many ways that reading makes writers of us all.

I COULD TELL YOU STORIES; By Patricia Hampl; (W.W. Norton: 192 pp., $23 paper)

In these essays, Patricia Hampl, memoirist, reviewer, professor, explores the variety of ways we describe our lives. She prefers the phrase, “I Could Tell You Stories,” impressed upon her memory by a plain woman on a bus decades ago, to the fictional “Once Upon A Time,” and admonishes a reader to remember, lest “those in power . . . deny the truth of memory in order to disarm moral and ethical power.” It seems quaint and earnest, this warning, an echo of the feminist cry “the personal is political.” Even in the ‘60s, the river was stiller. Now, we are all swept along in the torrent of fact and vision, gripping little pebbles of daily life, trying to decide what we want to take with us into the next century. Hampl shows how literature has helped her to survive when she writes about reading Walt Whitman in the ‘60s and ‘70s: “I could escape American history which was a bad dream,” she writes of the Vietnam years, “enter the dream of America. . . [and] return to the purity of abstraction, to the Mayflower moment.” In the same essay she writes: “Writing isn’t wishing; it is witnessing. But to what do you testify? To your own desperation?” Hampl’s history has a support-group purity to it, particularly if you grew up in those years as well. The best essays, as always, are not the ones in which Hampl knows the answer to a question and plods toward it. They are the ones that are full of discovery and uncertainty.

LOVE TROUBLE: New and Collected Work; By Veronica Geng; (Mariner Books: 336 pp., $13)

We need propulsion to swim upstream, and literature is good fuel. Humor is good, too. Veronica Gen gives us both in these essays. Geng, who died in 1997 at the age of 54, wrote and edited fiction at The New Yorker from 1976 to 1993. She made so many of us laugh, with her drunken, role-playing wit, her good sense and her keen eye for the absurdity of American politics (indeed, all self-arrogated authority). Just reading her was like locking arms with other readers to resist the tidal wave of the Reagan years. (The “mere word ‘Reagan’ was a punchline,” she discovers gleefully.) Geng made up graphs and charts and letters and voices that parodied the meaningless justifications of conservative congressmen, accountants, bureaucrats and generals. Her piece, “Petticoat Power,” on women in business (“the ambitious female of the species need no longer turn furtively to the so-called execu-cosmetology schools”) is one of the funniest: Attaching oneself to a mentor (“a man who has reached a ranking position of awesome responsibility”) is imperative. “Only through a mentor can you learn how mentorship itself works in your chosen field.”

“What I love most,” wrote Geng in “The New Thing,” is to be frivolous and then swerve into blatent sincerity. I have no idea why.” These essays are the arsenal Geng, a sober Dorothy Parker, left us.

MY RUSSIAN; By Deirdre McNamer; (Houghton Mifflin: 288 pp., $24)

Novels are the perfect technology for describing and framing the revelation so many of us have when we realize we are not living the life we want to live. The novel is like mica; the layers make a mirror, peeling apart chapter after chapter. In “My Russian,” Francesca Woodbridge drops out of her life, tells her husband and teenage son that she is going to Greece and instead rents a hotel room 11 blocks from her house. She assumes a carefully constructed identity and stalks herself. Her life has been unravelling: “It begins, then, with a loneliness and a body growing cool. And with the looming prospect of a home without children in it . . . the guy wires had been cut . . . the ceiling of my life was floating upward.” Her husband is in love with his work. Her son is in love with a girl he thinks he’ll marry. Francesca, unstable from the beginning, reviews her precarious life: meeting her husband, having the baby, making the home. She describes the dry twigs filling her chest.

But Deirdre McNamer is not entirely in control of her rather unlikeable character. Francesca is certainly depressed and certainly unhinged, but as a character on the brink, she is isolated even from her readers. Her world is equally flat, which makes “My Russian” a midwestern horizon of a novel, and reading it a bit like driving across Nevada--you spot things in the distance that look interesting, but the road swerves and you never get near them.