DISCOVERIES

WILD DECEMBERS By Edna O’Brien; Houghton Mifflin: 258 pp., $24

Wrong. Right. Matches in Ireland’s book of incendiary matches. But this is a country tale. Oh, it will end badly, all right. Times may change, but the blood never forgets. Times may change, but they bend closer toward money nowadays, everywhere. You know Bugler--the man who went away for so long, handsome as ever, back to claim his inheritance--is in the wrong. He who has purchased the fancy tractor, who has rented the land his neighbor’s cattle have grazed on for generations, who trumps with money and then with love, stealing the heart of his neighbor’s baby sister, a heart he does not deserve. He should not win in the small Irish village. His people were the bailiffs, much-hated guardians of the law. His neighbor’s people were the first farmers. “Don’t shoot!” you might exclaim, you who have never even set foot in Ireland, seduced by the loamy language. Edna O’Brien doesn’t have to try that hard; she wins us simply by describing “the fugitive amethyst river,” or “the gallant story of swash and buckle in Nelly’s Bar on an otherwise lacklustre winter night.” How easily it is told, the ancient story of two neighbors and the land.

THE TRAIN NOW DEPARTING By Martha Grimes; Viking: 186 pp., $22.95

Picture a fine-boned woman with a pale, triangular face. A muser, a loner, a noticer. She belongs in a train station that she never leaves. She sits in its cafe, eating her favorite grilled cheese sandwich or an herb omelet. It’s raining outside or might as well be, since we see this woman only in restaurants. Physically, she is barely described by Martha Grimes at all, but her interior life is rich.

She inhabits the “The Train Now Departing,” the first of Grimes’ two novellas, like a figure in the corner of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” She might be the “I” in Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” and in fact, it’s an a cappella novella, each note strong and noncompetitive.

“She would have liked,” Grimes tells us, “to be not the entertainer so much as the entertained.” Yet every few weeks she persists in having lunch with her travel-writer friend, a man who likes fancy food and scorns the sight of her little cafe, a man who waves his hand describing the Amazon, Tahiti, Maui, Bolivia--destinations she imagines with more lust than he has in his entire body. “Beauty is momentary in the mind,” he quotes Wallace Stevens to her, “The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal.” He says it; she drinks it in.

“When the Mousetrap Closes,” the second novella, is about a 53-year-old woman who falls into a weekly rendezvous with an actor she very much admires, only to find that she has become disposable material for a play he is rehearsing. Subject, object; friend, inspiration; art and life: Writing is a hall of mirrors, the best writers try to tell us. Sometimes you can’t tell what came first, the event or the story, the person or the character, the long-dead mother or the unborn baby, the reader or the writer. *

AFRICA IN MY BLOOD; An Autobiography in Letters By Jane Goodall; Edited by Dale Peterson; Houghton Mifflin: 372 pp., $28

She was 23 when she finally got to Africa in 1957, but Jane Goodall had dreamed of going there for years. For her first birthday, her father, who would leave when she was only 5, gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee she named Jubilee. She studied to become a secretary, but fate wasn’t having any of it. She went to work for her Aunt Olly, a psychotherapist, and was invited to visit the family farm of a childhood friend in Kenya. She waited tables and saved money and, finally, in 1957, she wrote home: “Darling Family . . . I still find it difficult to believe that I am on my way to Africa. That is the thing--AFRICA . . . names like Mombasa, Nairobi, South Kinangop, Nakuru, etc., are going to become reality.”

Once there, she drifted a bit, living in several places, and then fate, ever her friend, led her to Louis Leakey. The anthropologist was 54 at the time, recognized her commitment and considered her lack of training an asset. Three years later, she went to the Gombe Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika and made the first four of her many momentous discoveries: Chimps eat meat; chimps use tools; chimps do a rain dance; and, perhaps most important, chimps tolerated her presence.

She did not become a secretary. She became instead the world’s preeminent field zoologist. Her letters, from the time she was 7 to 32, reveal her fondness for family and friends, her steadfastness, her humor and irony (through which she reveals her true feelings) and her exuberance. Many are written from the field, describing details so many of us know from all the articles and documentaries about her. They are written, now and again, “with banana sticky hands.” *