DISCOVERIES

CROWE’S REQUIEM; By Mike McCormack; (Henry Holt: 232 pp., $25)

Mike McCormack writes like a tinker. His paragraphs have a wild, peaty smell on them; his plot is medieval. A baby born in a village in the west of Ireland is raised by his Druidic grandfather. He is blessed with itching shoulder blades and a heart on fire. He is cursed with a disease that makes him age four times faster than normal. His grandfather teaches him how to hunt, how to choose his own name (Crowe) and how to understand his destiny. When Crowe goes off to university, he meets his second angel, Maria, and when Maria needs money to continue her education, Crowe volunteers in a medical experiment that begins his end. The novel’s heart is a beautiful love story, the kind that takes place in a room--two people whose love and desire become their transportation to all kinds of understanding. But for all its magical realism, “Crowe’s Requiem” contains a very realistic magic: It makes you want to ask questions of ordinary people you meet, questions about living and dying, in case they are your guardian angels in disguise.

THE KINDNESS OF CHILDREN; By Vivian Gussin Paley; (Harvard University Press: 130 pp., $18.95)

“If the need to know how someone else feels,” writes Vivian Gussin Paley, the kindergarten teacher who wrote “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play” and who pioneered a method of teaching using storytelling, “is the rock upon which the moral universe depends, then the ancient sages were right. For this is surely what happens when children give each other roles to play in their continual inquiry into the nature of human connections.” In this book about the kindness of children, witnessed by Paley in classrooms from a remote rural community on Lake Superior to London, she captures the urgency and precision in the stories they tell in her program: “She lost her baby,” recites one 5-year-old. “She looked every place. What are you looking for, your baby? Here’s your baby, I’ve been playing with your baby ‘cause that’s my sister.” Paley tells these stories to her 97-year-old mother, who likens them to Hasidic storytelling, in which the author recounts stories of holy men doing mitzvoth or good deeds. These stories in turn inspire good deeds. “Children are eager,” Paley writes, “to take part in another’s stories so that they may fill in the empty spaces.” Paley is a fine writer who has learned in her life of observation how to let the subject drive the story and how to be a vulnerable player as well. It’s hard to live up to the sheer nobility of children, but Paley is its scholar.

SLEEP: Stories; By Stephen Dixon; (Coffee House Press: 277 pp., $15.95)

“Truth is,” writes the ever-playful, ever-neurotic Stephen Dixon in his story “the stranded man,” “I’m not here, or where I say I am, though I sometimes would like to be.” If every story collection has its fulcrum, the nucleus of the author’s intentions, in “Sleep” it’s “the stranded man.” In this story a writer lets his imagination go and reels it in, casts again, reels it in, makes a decision on the page that takes the story in a particular direction, then takes it back. It’s as if, in this and other stories, Dixon never crossed anything out. The frantic indecision and obsessive calculations of his characters remind a terrified reader of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” And the stories build on one another: The first are playful and neurotic. Then come the stories of children and of parents who make mistakes that ruin their children. The later stories in the book, like “never ends,” the tale of a horrible marriage, have less indecision but more unbearableness: the neuroses grow into full-fledged psychoses, ending with the final story, “sleep,” meaning the sleep of the living dead.

MEMORIES OF A LOST EGYPT; By Colette Rossant; (Clarkson Potter: 160 pp., $20)

Here is the memoir of a poor little rich girl, an Egyptian Eloise, daughter of a flighty French socialite mother and a wealthy Sephardic Egyptian father. When Colette Rossant is 6, in 1939, her father dies and she goes to live with her Egyptian grandparents for four blissful years while her mother travels through Beirut and Paris and Turkey. In that time, her mother never calls, but Colette has found true happiness in her grandmother’s kitchen, hovering around Ahmet the cook and watching the rituals of daily life unfold. The book includes recipes from Ahmet’s kitchen--roast chicken on a bed of leeks, sambusaks (pastries filled with feta), ful (Egyptian fava bean stew). On special occasions like weddings, there are petit fours and meatballs in apricot sauce. These foods are a balm to the little girl; they fill the sad holes in her memory with rich smells and the kindness of cooking for others. In 1944 her mother swoops down and puts her in a convent in Cairo, where, again, she finds comfort in the kitchen with the nuns. When her mother’s whim strikes again, Colette is taken to live with her cold French grandmother in Paris, where every effort is made to make her une jeune fille de bonne famille. Colette eventually marries an American, has four children and moves to New York. She does not return to Egypt until 1997. Everything is of course changed, with only a glimmer of the original glamour, but the recipes remain, the way recipes do, to be passed down through the generations.

THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT; By Steve Erickson; (Bard: 260 pp., $23)

On Davenhall Island in Northern California in 1999, a girl named Kristin runs away from home, becoming a memory girl (listening to male clients tell their life stories) in Tokyo. When her elderly client dies, she tells her story while waiting for the undertaker. Kristin tells of her escape from the mass suicide of 2,000 people on Davenhall Island, of answering an ad in L.A. that took her into the orbit of a paranoid obsessive recluse, the Occupant, her escape from him and her subsequent adventures. Characters move in concentric orbits like electrons, sometimes sprung from their paths to enter another generation, past or future. Steve Erickson is a master describer of cities, especially L.A., and a dizzying rewriter of history, myth and apocalypse.

In Erickson’s universe, entire cities, entire cultures go insane all at once. From the ruins, the author creates a new tribe, a new kinship map and a strange new world for his characters to enter into, reunited, close to whole. For all the noir, the spinning hands of clocks, history’s grim calendar, there are more births than deaths in “The Sea Came at Midnight.” I started out sore afraid, running to keep up with a wild pack of characters and ended calm and clean, ready for the millennium.