DISCOVERIES

SNOW MAN; By Carolyn Chute; (Harcourt Brace: 244 pp., $23)

Who’se afraid of Carolyn Chute? I am! I am! Someday I will read her novel, “The Beans of Egypt Maine,” but I just don’t feel strong enough yet. Chute is known as a son-of-a-bitch writer, a describer of cold climates and colder hearts, a looker in the faces of poverty, incest, anger and unfairness. Now I would never willingly sacrifice a book on the altar of Hollywood, but here is one that begs to be a movie: Robert Drummond is a right-wing militia man in Maine, a member of the Snow Men. His mission is to kill first a Republican and then a Democratic senator, but in the process of killing the Republican, he is wounded himself and collapses in the garage of the Democrat, where he has dragged himself, near death. He is rescued by the Democratic senator’s daughter and the senator’s wife, who hide him in their attic bedroom (it’s hot in there). He’s part Indian, very gorgeous, in pain, well endowed (Chute says so), full of life and rage against the government for what it has done to working-class people and his own family. Guess what? Both mother and daughter must have him (Papa is signing bills in Washington). The FBI becomes suspicious and surrounds the house. “Snow Man” is a study in risk and necessity: what people will do to get what they need. Outlaws, it seems clear, are always welcome in the arts.

ARITHMETIC; By Todd McEwen; (Jonathan Cape: 186 pp., $17.95)

It’s an interesting challenge to re-create the voice of a young child (autobiography or pure fiction, inner teddy bear or alter ego), to get the combination of humor and terror, the wobbly sense of navigating the world with partial information and pure instinct. Joe Lake is 7 years old, growing up in Orange County in the 1950s, which seems pretty amusing in retrospect. His family is forced to move when Disney comes knocking to build the Congo on their property. Still, it’s a good year for Joe and his best friend, Fard. They get their favorite teacher, Mrs. Dentyne (“Just thinking about Her made us both quiet. I got sofa feelings”) but they also get arithmetic, a subject that baffles and terrifies Joe. His father puts a blackboard in his room so they can work on arithmetic, “which just about wrecked my whole room, like filling it with deadly gas.” The voice is delightful, but be forewarned: Not much happens in the novel. This makes it a bit of a tableaux, a bit of a wax museum--charming, full of detail, winsome.

PEOPLE WHO SWEAT; By Robin Chotzinoff; (Harcourt Brace: 204 pp., $22)

She’s got a little Dave Barry, a little Ellen Goodman, a little Marion Winik but not a shred of Garrison Keillor or Andy Rooney. Robin Chotzinoff is a journalist who takes a microscope to daily life and finds the ontology that recapitulates the phylogeny. No preaching, no lecturing, a lot of hands-on field work with more wonder and amusement than judgment: That’s her style. And she picks her subjects well. This collection of essays, subtitled “The passion for sport, from ultra-marathoners to tree climbers,” includes a chapter on Clydesdales (large people who compete in marathons and other athletic events), in which Chotzinoff reprints a line from her own training diary: “Ran five miles. Hated it. Biked twenty. Hated it.” “At a free breakfast in the Super 8 motel lobby,” she reports on the morning of a marathon, “I learn the difference between eating, which I like, and feeding, which makes my jaws ache.” She tries caving (“Live floor. In other words, a cave floor so covered with bugs it seethes”), snowboarding in a camp for wild women, surfing with surfing housewives under the tutelage of Kahuna Bob in San Diego, bowhunting (“I wonder if Mattel will ever get cracking on a Hunting Barbie”), mall walking with the more than 50 Mall Stars and other fringe sports like fly fishing and sumo wrestling. In these pursuits, Chotzinoff has identified a heavenly mind-body equilibrium, a haven of competitive mediocrity, pure fun and childhood dreams.

BELLA TUSCANY; By Frances Mayes; (Broadway Books: 286 pp., $25)

This new book by the author of “Under the Tuscan Sun” charts the transformation of a house into a home, a process that has less to do with stones and paint and plants and labor than it does with the spirit settling into a place, weaving itself into the fabric of a place. The question Karen Blixen asks at the end of “Out of Africa,” namely, I wonder if Africa will remember me, describes the same deepening of the relationship between person and place (not birthplace, but chosen place) that Frances Mayes explores in “Bella Tuscany.” She ponders guests and secret gardens and language and Italian food and family (a little of her own childhood and her husband Ed’s) and the nature of happiness. (I think we all like reading her because she seems, quite simply, to have a knack for happiness.) Walking back to her house on a night in autumn after a gelato in town, Mayes thinks: “I have the ambition to see every cypress tree in Tuscany. Like the California oaks in the Bay Area countryside, the cypresses seem to speak for the landscape. The bare oaks of California interact with light. . . . But the cypresses play no games with light. If they were in the sky they would be the black holes and if I were in America, I would be petrified to be on a deserted road at night.” She was, it is not hard to remember, a poet first.

CLOSE RANGE; By Annie Proulx; (Scribner: 286 pp., $25)

Desicated (not even bloody), mean, wary, these Wyoming stories require all five senses. You have to read them as though you were a mangy, warty, desperate desert animal whose life depended on the information they contained. You can’t just expect to pick them up and put them down: You have to scramble. Annie Proulx, who has made some of us laugh and some of us cry with her prize-winning fiction, has an alarming amount in common with the writer Ted Hughes--in whose work the very survival of the subconscious is at stake. And when you finally rest, your knuckles perhaps bloodied, you see in these stories a life that is fragile and subtle, much like cactuses and desert flowers--never mind that the language bumps and grinds and rumbles and skews your understanding of the world. In “The Half-Skinned Steer,” a man returns to the ranch he grew up on. In “The Mud Below,” a short man becomes a rodeo rider. In “The Blood Bay,” a cowboy saws the boots off a frozen corpse. These are the bones. Here’s some of the flesh: “He knew he was getting down the page and into the fine print of this way of living. . . . All around him wild things were falling to earth.” His eyes moved “over her like an iron over a shirt.” As for the breath, well, Proulx must go into a trance and collect it herself, a voodoo she does, like the great literary shamans.