DISCOVERIES

Here’s a novel about heritage, about finding out who you are (even though your ancestors were practically a different species), that doesn’t make you gag with its narcissism, that isn’t so gooey and overripe it falls off the vine and into the gutter. Especially, it does not do the Latin American cha-cha-cha routine--the magical realism, visionary gypsy border-gal thing that turns lesser novels set in Mexico into TV sitcoms. The characters have dignity, like Carlos Fuentes’ characters. There’s a variety of classes in this novel, as in real life, not just one washed-out, beseeching class. There’s history that is made of individuals, history a modern-day novelist can get rolled up in and confused by, as the novel’s narrator does.

At the heart of the novel is a story “about a woman named Fernanda, an uncle, and a gringo,” passed down through generations. The story is based on love but also on fate. It begins in the mid-1800s in a small town called Tula Station in Mexico and ends well. When its narrator threatens to romanticize it, to turn it into a fairy tale, his ancestor keeps him in line. Until he gets it right, he will have to live it again and again, like karma.

SICK PUPPY, A Novel; By Carl Hiassen; Alfred A. Knopf: 342 pp., $25

As novelists, Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry (both columnists for the Miami Herald, although Hiassen has moved on) have an awful lot in common. Must be the Florida sun, which has probably never touched the skin of either of these journalist-nerds, the result being column-worthy cleverness, snappy indoor repartee, nut graphs like sprinkles on an ice-cream cone and bad guys that get their comeuppance. Both specialize in all-American bad guys (bureaucrats or developers or lobbyists) and heroes (homeless men or rabid environmentalists).

The hero in “Sick Puppy” is Twilly Spree. His methods are questionable, but his values are good: in this case, he wants to save the island of the oak toads that big business and government want to turn into condominiums. Twilly’s career began when he blew up his uncle’s bank (“a branch, not the main office”).

This is the kind of novel in which people share affinities with their abductors and talk to them like therapists, in which the wife of the fat lobbyist falls for the tree-spiker. Rife with charm. Chalk it up to boyish wishful thinking.

SO I AM GLAD, A Novel; By A.L. Kennedy; Alfred A. Knopf: 288 pp., $23

“I don’t have any moles,” this extremely messed-up narrator confides. If you were in a subway, you’d keep walking, but you’re not! You’re reading a novel by a young Scottish writer only slightly less polished and fierce in her intelligence than Jeanette Winterson. This narrator, Jennifer Wilson, has the same lecture-delivering arrogance as a Winterson narrator and the shut-in, system-loving, survivalist insanity of Raskolnikov, patron saint of crazy narrators. As a result, A.L. Kennedy’s “So I Am Glad” is a bit like a tutorial. Ten minutes in, you start looking for the exit signs.

So when Jennifer gets a new housemate, fairly early on, named Martin, we are hopeful that he will pull the plug and let some air out, so to speak. Which he does. Martin turns out to be Cyrano de Bergerac, born in 1619, thrown into the 20th century like a homeless angel. Jennifer (S&M; queen of cold) falls in love with him, her best quality. Martin almost gets the novel aloft, but it cannot take off. Jennifer keeps pushing the fire alarm.

MISS WYOMING, A Novel; By Douglas Coupland; Pantheon: 320 pp., $23

Susan and John make sense even though they are actors. Susan’s career (which began with beauty pageants and one of those mothers who put 9-year-olds on diets because by God they are going to make it even it’s only on their looks; Mommy could get out of the Ozarks only by marrying an abusive boor) is in the doldrums, but she was famous enough once to have fans who love her for her camp appeal.

The only survivor of a terrible plane crash she rather hazily wandered away from, Susan spent a year hiding from her own identity and having a baby before returning to L.A. John, rich-kid son of pesticide magnates, had a Hollywood breakdown after almost dying and decided to give everything he ever owned, as well as the proceeds from his hit movie, “Mega Force,” away and change his life. Under mystical circumstances, he falls in love with Susan and spends the course of the novel trying to get to her.

Douglas Coupland makes us want this, too, and one wishes only that his Los Angeles could rise above the typical mini-mall, producer-mansion landscape. Susan and John and Ryan (a video store clerk) and Vanessa (Ryan’s girlfriend who works at Rand) are more than gum-chewing knock-offs, but “Miss Wyoming’s” city is a paper set.