THE TINY ONE A Novel; By Eliza Minot; Alfred A. Knopf: 254 pp., $22 : MY CAT SPIT McGEE; By Willie Morris; Random House: 142 pp., $17) : TWO BY TWO; By Eve Babitz; Simon & Schuster: 200 pp., $22 : THE LONGEST SILENCE A Life in Fishing; By Thomas McGuane; Alfred A. Knopf: 280 pp., $25

Via Revere at 8 has a voice like that of Eloise of the Plaza. Smells, fears, coveted items, mazy observations on adult folkways are barely hampered by grammar. What’s different about Via’s runaway imagination is that her memories reverberate, like rings in a pond, from the death of her mother; from the day she was pulled out of class, met by her father and told that there had been a terrible car accident. With childlike concentration she struggles to remember every little thing about her mother, every summer in Maine, every morning and nap-time cuddle, every piece of advice, to make sure that her mother stays alive in her, “like that fertilizer that Dad sprinkles in the garden. . . . It’s the tiny one thing in me that’s at the bottom of all the rest, the tiny one thing that will, like, hold me forever to looking for Mum. It makes my eyes like watcher eyes.” Knowing this all through “The Tiny One” sluices even the happy facts of big-family life through an emotional dredge. The fact of death purrs in the center of the novel. I understand why young writers, like Eliza Minot, make fiction from their lives. Death, that much further away, forces them to gather every detail closer. *

MY CAT SPIT McGEE By Willie Morris; Random House: 142 pp., $17)

I admit that you have to be willing to throw yourself into a Norman Rockwell-Mayberry frame of mind to really appreciate Willie Morris. The world he describes in “My Cat Spit McGee” is about as far from where I’m sitting in downtown L.A. as Jupiter. You can look and look in his books on pets and places he has loved and you won’t find a mean bone to chew on. He’s not sarcastic, he’s not edgy, he’s not blasphemous. “Well, damn!” you say. “I suppose,” he writes toward the end of this observation that spans nine years and four generations of a single cat family, “this has really been a little tale about time in its passing, as all stories must be.” Morris puts the brakes on daily life, and I have to say it is soothing. The first quarter or so of this brief book shows Morris resisting cats with all his intellectual strength. A dog lover, he knows that dog lovers must hate cats. When he falls in love with Cat Woman, he faces the inevitable paradigm shift. Her grown children give her a kitten for Christmas that Morris names (he is the great namer) Rivers Applewhite, after a character in his childhood. Rivers’ first kitten must be rubbed into life and, in doing this, Morris begins his life of indentured servitude. The kitten is named Spit McGee, and he is by all accounts extraordinary in his compassion, his telepathic powers and his appreciation of sports. “I’ve learned how to care for them on their own terms,” Morris says of his years as a cat man. “And don’t try to figure them out too much.” *

TWO BY TWO By Eve Babitz; Simon & Schuster: 200 pp., $22

Who could ever be lonely with Eve Babitz in town? The chattiest of writers, she writes the way she might talk on the phone. At the end of “Two by Two,” a series of essays on social dancing and dance clubs and teachers in L.A., you have every right to expect the last sentence to read: “Well, gotta run, bye!” I swear she’s writing with the fridge door open, closing it with her foot. Babitz is so chatty, she reminds me of Patty Duke. In L.A., most of us know someone who has fallen for ballroom dancing and leads a second life in a parallel universe we homebodies can only imagine. In this guide for the uninitiated, Babitz takes some of this mystery away. Still, she is a devotee, admits to loving bars and clubs and dressing up and dancing and flirting. People who dance, she writes, have, “if not better lives, at least better clothes.” Babitz writes about tango, salsa, fais do-do, fox trot and swing (East and West Coast). “Partner dancing is a cultured act.” This is as political as she gets. “Once anyone gets into it, they are a step up from violence, they are in civilized survival skills training.” *

THE LONGEST SILENCE A Life in Fishing By Thomas McGuane; Alfred A. Knopf: 280 pp., $25

“Leave as much behind as possible,” Thomas McGuane advises in “The Longest Silence.” “Those motives to screw your boss or employees, cheat on your spouse, rob the state, or humiliate your companions will not serve you well if you expect to be restored in the eyes of God, fish, and the river.” This makes you worry for McGuane who, since he seems to have fished every inch of every river he’s crossed in his life, must have little left. McGuane is single-minded, his language oddly formal, his sarcasm deeply buried. He remembers an uncle, a judge, as “rather unreconstructed, yet this renders him an infinitely more palpable individual in my memory than the adaptable nullities who have replaced men like him.” Things, you may have gathered, are not getting better in McGuane’s view of the world, especially our priorities, namely, conservation. He explains his version of realpolitik to his son: “If the trout are gone, smash the state.” Sure, he waxes now and then; describing flies, for example, that are the equivalent of “Victorian architectural follies.” He bestows the highest compliment in a writer’s cosmography to a memorable moment fishing: “It was like literature!” I am usually struck by how good fishermen are at noticing everything except the fish, but McGuane seems to catch everything in his net, where it falls, like spiritually regulated sediment, sensible, natural and clear.