DISCOVERIES

There you are, reading Kent Haruf’s novel, hooked up to an IV through which flows the milk of human kindness. He controls the dosage. You need it badly, so you keep reading through the parts in which you think you can’t take it: the depressed mother who leaves her sons, the teenage girl whose mother kicks her out because she is pregnant, the class bully who makes his girlfriend sleep with his friends. Haruf, like Carolyn Chute, Annie Proulx and Raymond Carver, has captured our coldness, the particularly American cruelty that varies slightly by region but is born of excess, greed and the replacement of a spiritual center with material things.

It’s a loud noise that emanates from this quiet novel, more like a keening as the first few chapters reveal the plot. Tom Guthrie’s wife Ella will not get out of her bed in this small Colorado town, sometime in the 1980s. He makes breakfast for his boys, 9 and 10, in whom small cracks of sadness are growing into the insecurities and fears that bring down adults like cattle roped for slaughter. In the same town, Victoria Roubideaux, 17 and pregnant, begs her mother not to throw her out. In a steady, pure voice, Haruf gives his characters the cure--in the form of a kind, nourishing woman who takes in Victoria, then brings her to live with two elderly cattle farmers--shy brothers who care for her and protect her in that way that redefines the term nuclear family. True to the country he writes about, Haruf builds his characters out of small gestures and daily rituals, not dialogue. Theirs is a deep language, like the rumble before an earthquake.

HIGH TECH HERETIC By Clifford Stoll Doubleday: 214 pp., $24.95

“Wisdom and knowledge,” writes Clifford Stoll, author of “The Cuckoo’s Egg” and “Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway,” are “linked to scholarship, ideas, experience, maturity, judgment, perspective, and reflection. But they have little to do with information. Nor do they have much to do with power. . . . [P]ower . . . depends on social skills.” In this book, Stoll continues his love-hate relationship with computers, making a case that they do more harm than good, especially in the classroom. We ought, he argues, to understand the isolating, often anti-social effects of computers, rather than slavishly sing their praises. Schools that buy computers instead of hiring new teachers, libraries that give up their books for databases, programs that start 9-month-old babies on computers--all these raise Stoll’s hackles. He is especially wary of products and people who insist that computers can make learning fun. “Most learning isn’t fun,” he growls. “Learning takes work. Discipline.” Stoll swims upstream on the information highway, populated, as he sees it, by refugees.

CATFISH AND MANDALA By Andrew X. Pham; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 346 pp., $25

Courage is not limited to the battlefield; it often comes in the peace. At 27, Andrew X. Pham, who came to America as a child and grew up in Orange County to become a successful engineer, began his bicycling journey through Vietnam with an act of courage. He refuses to look at the birth fortune given to his grandmother by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, the same monk who predicted his sister’s suicide. “Catfish and Mandala” is about getting to the heart of a memory, penetrating the darkness of a traumatic childhood: in Pham’s case, the boat ride that took him and his family to safety in the United States. “We are weak,” a friend in Saigon says, trying to discourage Pham from biking to Hanoi. “Only Westerners can do it. They are strong and better than us.” This beaten-down feeling is like gravity to Pham, who tries to shake free of it throughout his trip. Several times he almost breaks down, and these moments are told with visceral honesty. “I stood rotten with doubts,” he writes after seeing a mother and baby begging on the streets of Saigon. And he moves toward pride and understanding: “The beauty is so awfully sweet,” he writes later in the book, from a village outside Hanoi. “I think I can taste it somewhere near the center of me.” *

SOMEWHERE IN A DESERT A Novel By Dominique Sigaud; Arcade: 128 pp., $22.95

The body of a soldier is found in the desert, days after the Gulf War has ended. Ali Ben Fakr, the man who finds him, is struck by the immediacy of the man’s soul, the peace of the body, the smile on his face. He cannot bring himself to bury him. In the presence of the body, Ali finds that everything familiar seems alien: “[A]ll around, the sleeping sky, the palm trees and the earth seemed strangers; everything was turning from him, slipping through his fingers.” (In Dominique Sigaud’s lovely writing, the lines between death and life and love and hate shift like the dunes in the desert.) Ali’s wife, Nour, follows him one night and then returns on her own to see the body. It speaks to her. She goes back to the village and brings her friends to come and see it. It speaks to them as well. Back in Provo, Utah, the man’s wife, Mary, receives news that her husband is missing in action. They were in love, and Sigaud writes the letters that passed between them during the war. Mary goes to find him. Sigaud has written this parable with her finger on a pulse. The book throbs with loss and desire.