DISCOVERIES

It is gratifying to read novels that interweave books into the lives of the characters. Sometimes the books scatter ghosts into the present, sometimes they haunt the characters. Michael Cunningham’s tremendously popular novel “The Hours” reverberates off Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” In “The Book Borrower,” it’s “Trolley Girl,” a book set in the 1920s and passed between two friends, Deborah and Toby, in a playground in 1975.

“Trolley Girl’s” story floats through this one--the story of a friendship between two mothers. It is gracefully done--the tone of the older book infects the tone of the present; details, exclamation points, oddities in thought and conversation have a Dickensian feel to them, even as Patty Hearst is acquitted in the background. But the really fine thing about Alice Mattison’s style is her sense of proportion. Taking a friendship that spans several decades, in which careers are pursued, children hatched and educated, husbands argued with and loved, dogs patted, she makes the friendship into the novel’s sun, shining and absorbing light from those other details. When the friends are separated, all of the planets go spinning askew. It’s a marvelous galaxy the author has created. Some of the atmospheric pressures between these friends are familiar--jealousy, different talents, different relationships--but many are private, as though the friendship had its own soul that lives on after it’s over, even after the book is closed. *

THREE WOMEN By Marge Piercy, William Morrow: 310 pp., $25

Marge Piercy is every bit as organized as her main character, Suzanne, a middle-aged mother and type-A public interest lawyer. Suzanne’s mother, Beverly, was an elegant, powerful union organizer, who, early in the novel, has a heart attack and shows us what it is like to be stripped, in old age, of your power, physical and emotional. Suzanne has two daughters, Elena and Rachel. Rachel is studying to be a rabbi and is the good daughter; Elena gets in big trouble all of the time, especially when she has an affair with Suzanne’s best friend’s husband. You can imagine that Piercy’s main commentary on the state of womanhood in this novel is that we function like ropes that are constantly being pulled in all directions and frayed beyond repair. Suzanne tries to save everyone, but she never sits still long enough to be able to really listen to anyone. “Don’t let life do this to you!” the book screams. Piercy’s plot allows her to take on just about every issue facing women from 12 to 75. It’s a scary whirlwind, with one woman trying desperately to gain control over her life and everyone else’s. The problem is that in this maelstrom, things lack proportion; solutions to problems have a smoothed-over therapy sound to them. There’s hardly any breathing room between Piercy’s politics and her characters’ lives. The sex scenes are some of the best parts of the novel because moral judgment is temporarily suspended: You get to rest while you read them. *

PEEL MY LOVE LIKE AN ONION By Ana Castillo, Doubleday: 224 pp., $23.95

Carmen La Coja is a 36-year-old flamenco dancer with a limp from a childhood bout with polio. Ana Castillo writes all about Carmen, barely straying to the other characters--Augustin, Manolo and a few others whom Carmen loves and is treated badly by. It is a fiery treatise on losing control in love, one that does not entirely condemn that black hole in female consciousness (also in male but not in the world of this novel). And Castillo makes unforgettable characters, using a magic trick of quirk and metaphor. Manolo, for example, has a laugh that “rang hollow like a big bell that makes a loud-bong warning sound because you’ve pulled its clapper, not because it’s been stirred on its own.” Her relationship with Augustin is “a love dried up like a persimmon left in the fruit bowl too long and both of us too lazy to throw it out.” Carmen exists in many worlds--the traditional world of her mother and in Hollywood. The music, as Castillo writes, licks her ankles. *

THE SUMMER OF ’39 By Miranda Seymour, W.W. Norton: 230 pp., $23.95

One must back into this dangerous novel. Miranda Seymour has written several books, including a biography of the poet Robert Graves, whose literary fame was rivaled only by his notoriety in the realm of romance. One of his relationships was with the poet Laura Riding, who was Plath-like in her seeming ability to cause trouble and to suffer in love. This haunted novel is based, in part, on the summer of 1939, when Laura Riding visited Time critic Schuyler Jackson and took him from his wife, Kit. Kit went insane, tried to strangle their daughter and was sent to a mental institution. In this novel, Nancy, the wife (Kit’s fictional counterpart), remembers her childhood (including rape by her deranged father and the blind eye of her mother) and the events of that fateful summer. It is page-turning and tragic, with shining moments of beauty in which Nancy’s lifelong love for her aunt and uncle’s home in Falmouth, Mass.--the home she inhabits as an adult--is more real than any of her shadowy memories. Wood floors, sailboats, old drawings--a reader lurches toward these objects out of sheer terror from the human drama that unfolds. “I saw long cool rooms,” Nancy remembers, “hushed by canvas blinds and smelling of roses and lavender. A wind from beyond blew against the blinds and spattered them with shadows.”