DISCOVERIES

How difficult it must be to construct another human being on the page--a real character, not a vessel for argument but a creature of facets and distractions. Elizabeth Richards’ main character, Paige Austin, is a particular challenge because we don’t meet many people like her--a person so mature and big-hearted that even her sadness enriches her. Paige responds to her own depression with increased kindness toward others. For example, unable to have children, she takes care of five “littles” who are dropped off by their harried parents each morning in the apartment Paige shares with her husband Ian. Her imaginative, joyous days with them are some of the best parts of the novel. Richards has a way of leveling the language between ages; 2-year-olds and 17-year-olds and 40-year-olds share the same humor and gravity.

Paige suppresses many of her own needs, and they tick away ominously under her daily life. When Ian’s teenage son from a first marriage comes to live with them, Paige finds her love for him, in all its complicated ambiguity, threatening to unglue a life constructed much like the books she professionally binds to round out her income. This precarious situation eddies around her very strong character, well-built by Richards using humor, a talent for dialogue and a writer’s careful observance of love between people of all ages.

EVENSONG; By Gail Godwin; (Ballantine: 416 pp., $25)

There is a kind of novel in which destinies are woven from scraps and details, items which, standing alone, look a lot like creeping minutiae. What’s horrific is how little time we take in our own lives to do this accounting, until their slow, silent accumulation demands reckoning. Suddenly we are not the people we thought we wanted to be. In fiction, an author can swoop in to save a character from the future; sometimes they choose not to.

Gail Godwin doesn’t so much write her characters’ lives as punctuate them. “Evensong” is the portrait of a marriage of two ministers in a small town in the Great Smoky Mountains. Margaret is not getting the romance or the sex from the marriage that she needs. (I have not read such a good description of that slow death since “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) The parish context is reminiscent of Trollope; characters battle the opposing forces of spirituality and society. Her sentences contain a great deal of information--sometimes a little too much is revealed all at once, spilled like the words of an unwanted companion at a bar, but prophets lurk in every corner of this very full novel.

THE WORLD AND OTHER PLACES: Stories; By Jeanette Winterson; (Alfred A. Knopf: 216 pp., $22)

How she must delight her British fans, this deeply British writer with her mix of gardening and lesbianism. When she wrote “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” it was lonely territory, but Jeanette Winterson has emerged from the desert, and all the trails are now named after her.

Her people (for surely her characters haunt her house) are almost always treated as though they are crazy, even as the reader is made to understand that it’s their society that is truly perverse. She’s a modern writer, a modern thinker, but the stark choices she presents in these stories place her firmly in intellectual traditions that belong to the previous century. What is the true faith, science or religion? Whether ‘tis nobler to live with men or with women? Choose one: Recluse or socialite; risk-loving artist or pension-planning career gal. Winterson’s images are fantastic: “Miss Bead, the one with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist,” the Cheshire house in which rooms go missing, an “eloquent” tree “whose top stretches up to heaven and whose roots push down to hell.”

Winterson is not writing for a parallel canon. She wants to weigh in on traditional subjects: like the Green Man essay included in this collection. (Male British writers through the millenniums have written Green Man essays revealing their reflections on nature. Should it be tamed or left alone? Is it within us or outside us?) Winterson’s a grand warrior. In the missile glow of her energetic language and imagination, it’s the battlefields down below that look bland.

MEAN JUSTICE; By Edward Humes; (Simon and Schuster: 492 pp., $26)

I wish this were a novel. Then we could all maintain a few of the delusions still standing about justice and how it is served in America. But Edward Humes has made us another fine sculpture for a public square like his previous book, “No Matter How Loud I Shout” about the juvenile justice system. He’s built this true story of a man unfairly convicted of killing his wife from a human being, a marriage, a town, a community, a desert and a crime that challenges all our fears and priorities.

Set in Bakersfield, “Mean Justice” reveals the crucible for truth, race and politics that is Kern County. In July 1992, Pat Dunn calls the police to report his wife missing. Still reeling from several ring crimes, including an appalling child molestation case, Kern County is in the grip of an anti-crime hysteria that, Humes shows, threatens the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, in Bakersfield and across the country. Pressures on city council people, judges, D.A.s and prosecutors to identify and punish perpetrators leads to Dunn’s wrongful arrest. He remains in prison at the end of the book. This is the same seamless, honest and also lyrical writing that earned Humes a Pulitzer Prize.

UMBRIA: Italy’s Timeless Heart; By Paul Hofmann; (Henry Holt: 224 pp., $25)

Paul Hofmann lives in Rome and spent many happy years as head of the New York Times bureau there. For 40 years, he has traveled through Umbria, imbibing landscape and frescoes and paintings and food and language. Unlike many recent books on Italy that describe owning a piece of it and making it home, Hofmann seems to take Italy more on its own terms. His tone is that of a reverential foreigner who gracefully accepts the fact that he will never really be a native. Hiring men to build stone walls will not make him Italian. His first interests in each new town are the architecture and the character of the people who live in that region. (Identifying prejudices that go back a thousand years can tell you a lot about how current residents drive on the freeways, for example.) “Umbria” is meant to be carried around as you walk through Umbria, not read wistfully in, for example, downtown Los Angeles.