DISCOVERIES

“Women have such vivid imaginations,” Lolly Willows, a middle-aged British woman, explains to the devil, “and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance. Do you understand?” Temporarily in the form of a clear-headed gardener, the devil understands, though the institution of evil and its leader have less appeal for Lolly than its pantheistic traditions and its alternative to bourgeois, female-erasing proper society. After her father dies, Lolly goes to live with her brother and his wife in their well-run household in London. This she withstands for 20 years before she moves to a country village, drawn by the beech trees and the wind, and discovers that she is a witch. It happens slowly, like a calling, beginning with an urge for wilderness and a desire to get away from her family. “Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing.” Lolly Willows’ self-discovery is what makes this book, written in 1923, revolutionary. The writing is Jane Austen and Henry James rolled into one, with a pinch of Beatrix Potter (the wicca-like investment of objects with spirit and the shadowy importance of creatures like hedgehogs, limpets, owls, cats and onions). Sylvia Townsend Warner’s mystical characterizations of landscapes are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s. Lolly Willows’ life is full of clues that lead her to self-discovery, then on to a higher, convention-flaunting spirit.*

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN By Jonathan Lethem; Doubleday: 312 pp., $23.95

Imagine the opportunities to explore language that arise when the narrator of a novel has Tourette’s syndrome. “Tourette’s,” explains Lionel, Jonathan Lethem’s main character, who grew up in St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn, “teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive.” Lethem crawls into this mind, treating the disease like a neighborhood he lives in. As a teenager, Lionel and several other boys were “rescued” by Frank Minna to work in his moving business. They called themselves Minna Men, though in the novel’s opening pages, Frank Minna is murdered. Lionel will find the man responsible. Indeed, Lethem’s brilliance is in the way he bounces around in that skull, making jokes and puns, making myth from reality, coining unforgettable words like: “zengeance,” “apocamouse,” “octapot” and “tittappotamus.” Lionel digests words. We all slip and say what we really think, though when Lionel does it, it’s usually around authority figures and it usually involves the phrase “eat me.” “My own name,” he thinks, “was the original verbal taffy, now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull.” Brooklyn, of course, is a beautiful character, hanging behind the novel like a full moon that has drunk a little too much. *

VIOLET & CLAIRE By Francesca Lia Block; Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins: 176 pp., $14.95

Francesca Lia Block is a home girl from Topanga. Her first novel, “Weetzie Bat,” was written for a young adult audience, but her writing is roundly enjoyed by fully grown readers as well. Indeed, what constitutes fully grown is a question Violet and Claire, 17-year-old high school students in L.A., have to figure out. The adults around them (whom Claire likens to the teacher in the Peanuts cartoon who intones “Waah, waah, waah,” in lieu of language) don’t provide any clues. Violet, the rich girl, is putting the final coat on her hardened bad-girl image. She is writing a screenplay and “discovers” Claire, an ingenue, who becomes Violet’s sidekick and leading lady. Men are mostly dangerous, from the poetry professor to the big-shot agency guy, and the real world is pure nasty as far as the eye can see. The girls save each other, a victory for sweetness, but Block’s slick-hip language doesn’t give a reader much faith that, outside the book, goodness triumphs.*

ALL QUIET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS By Magnus Mills; Arcade: 210 pp., $23.95

What I love about Magnus Mills (aside from the fact that he was a London bus driver until his first novel, “The Restraint of Beasts,” made him famous) is that he can make the contents of a garage suspenseful. Lists of the day’s occupations and every little thought that enters his main character’s head (don’t worry, there aren’t that many) are interrupted by purely cinematic images: an ice cream van careens through a village trailing a children’s nursery jingle, “half a pint of treacle”; a man standing in the rain with his broken-down motorcycle is passed by a busload of schoolchildren; “a dozen pink faces” stare out at him. Mills’ narrator, an odd-jobber, intends to go east (as in the Orient) for the winter on a train but stops in the Lake District for a few weeks, plenty of time for the community to start weaving its fine web of obligation around him. One job leads to another, his debt at the local pub grows. As in “The Restraint of Beasts,” these lives are so predictable that something must happen or everyone--author, reader, characters--will go stark raving. But no: Like Hitchcock, Mills reveals the mystery in everything from grocery lists to theunemotional intentions of simple country people. All remains quiet, especially on the Orient Express.*