DISCOVERIES : HAVING EVERYTHING By John L’Heureux; Atlantic Monthly Press: 230 pp., $24 : A BOY IN WINTER By Maxine Chernoff; Crown: 242 pp., $22 : THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS By David Huddle; Houghton Mifflin: 224 pp., $23 : BIG TROUBLE By Dave Barry; Putnam: 272 pp., $23.95

“Having Everything” is a gracefully written, painfully familiar look at adulthood. The writing is so sharp and clear, in fact, that “Having Everything” is an Andrew Wyeth painting of a novel, in which every gesture, every blade of grass cuts through to some emotion, traveling a distance from skin to heart that could exist only after at least four decades of life, like a complete molecule with all eight rings from its nucleus to its outer shell, and no need to bond. John L’Heureux sets the novel in Cambridge, Mass., in academia (a particularly precious part of the world). Philip, a psychiatrist, is married to Maggie, a beautiful but (guess what?) depressed woman who dropped her PhD program way back when to have two lovely children. They have everything, but Philip has a little problem left over from childhood. He likes to break into houses. What’s grown up about this novel is the way Philip and Maggie set about trying to solve their problems. For most of the book, they fail, but they keep getting up and trying because that’s what adults do. As Maggie’s drinking and pill popping get worse, Philip’s love and support (even in his limited, repressed, nonverbal way) make him into a character you like. Love, real, persistent, shakable but not destroyable love, is what adulthood is all about. “And then it came to him that there was only one thing he could do,” Philip realizes during a particularly bad episode with Maggie. “He must find her and love her, as she was determined to be, just love her. . . . And if you didn’t know how to love, you could pretend, and if you pretended long enough--who knows?--it might turn into love.”

A BOY IN WINTER By Maxine Chernoff; Crown: 242 pp., $22

This is tragedy, cruelly, precisely, unflinchingly drawn and told in the voices of several characters. Danny’s father left his mother, Nancy, when Danny was 2. She has been a brave and loving mother and she has made mistakes as well. When Danny is 11, she begins a relationship with her next door neighbor’s husband, Frank Nova, whose son, Eddie, is Danny’s friend. One day Eddie comes over to Danny’s house with a crossbow. There is a tussle. Danny shoots Eddie and kills him. In a moment, Nancy watches a life that she has protected and nurtured lose its future. Danny is sent to a correctional facility. The relationship between Frank and Nancy is revealed. Did Danny kill Eddie on purpose? Even he is uncertain. “Maybe things got mislaid that winter,” he writes in the journal a psychiatrist has asked him to keep. “Maybe it got so cold because someone (or some thing) wasn’t watching.” Behind Maxine Chernoff’s question of murder or accident lurks the question: Do we ruin our children when we divorce? Who is to blame when our children’s lives go wrong?*

BIG TROUBLE By Dave Barry; Putnam: 272 pp., $23.95

I’ve never met anyone who affirmatively doesn’t like Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, whose first novel is set in Miami’s vice world--the pathetic silly world of small-time Russian arms traders, Coconut Grove housewives, hit men, punks and insane thugs. And nothing is funnier to Barry than the male ego run amok, the cop who wants to be a hero, the businessman who goes crazy and becomes convinced that Elizabeth Dole, in the form of his dog, is trying to steal his already questionable soul, the drunk who wants to be a crime fighter. The heroes in “Big Trouble” are Puggy, a homeless man, a female cop named Monica and a Hispanic maid named Nina. Love is grand in Barry’s fiction, eliciting a “whoa” from our narrator whenever the thrill is in the air. There’s also the language Barry has used for years, with his favorite word, “pesky” making several appearances. Let’s face it, Florida is almost as funny as New Jersey, and any novel in which the wife-beating mean guy goes insane from the toxins of a giant toad fills a gentle reader with the warmth of smugness.*

THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS By David Huddle; Houghton Mifflin: 224 pp., $23

Like Flannery O’Connor, David Huddle (who is from the south) has ideas about good and evil and the things in life that keep us from killing ourselves. Like Eudora Welty, he knows how to create characters that make these ideas live. Huddle, a poet, also knows how to write as though he doesn’t know all the answers--at any moment a character could swerve, a life could dissolve. This makes for momentum and suspense in his writing, even as he takes on a terrifying list of questions: When does youth end and adulthood begin? What makes a woman beautiful? What is goodness? What is evil? How important is secrecy in a relationship? And finally, like Faulkner, how well can we ever know another? This is the story of four friends. Marcy is married to Allen and Jimmy is married to Uta. Marcy brings the most baggage to the novel and is its main narrator, though chapters move from one voice to another and less frequently to peripheral characters. When Marcy was 15, a 41-year-old friend of her parents, Robert, brought her into a relationship that permanently removed her from the present tense. With each turn from voice to voice, the novel deepens, the web gets stronger, our understanding of the characters gets richer and our judgments weaker. Still, it is clear in the end what leads to happiness and what leads to the soul’s perdition. *