DISCOVERIES

Rules and resolutions are made to be broken; form is lovely, but lovelier with function--a landscape likes a horizon. A novel is only a form, meant to be broken, but it has a feng shui like every other edifice; it has a Da Vincian proportion in which things and people, wind and light, can move without frustration. Because a novel is so very much more like a building than a stage, to speak of feng shui seems appropriate. We enter a novel of the street, sometimes reluctantly. There is an entryway, there are rooms, there are windows to other worlds--aha!--there are people. I have dreamed of unfinished characters, badly drawn characters in books I have read, and they are like ghosts, angry as ghosts and doomed to wander beautiful rooms in detail-filled novels, never to have souls. You can’t have one without the other in a novel, it flummoxes the feng shui.

“Undue Influence” seems a bit of an experiment with character for Anita Brookner, who usually fills the spaces between people in her novels with more than their ruminations. After a hundred pages, ruminations can start to seem like dust devils on a windy street. You want the character to do something, but life is paralysis as well as action. Claire Pitt, Brookner’s 29-year-old spinster, has the painstaking awareness of an Iris Murdoch character. Each person who enters her tiny orbit (and there are mercifully few) commands Claire’s full imagination. She works, spider-like, in a dusty London bookshop and lives in the flat she shared with her unhappy mother until her mother’s death. She has one friend and longs for a man but cannot engage enough to provoke one. Claire, as whole in this novel as she will ever be, will not haunt us, but she falls off the stage in the end, without epiphany--hara-kiri, she falls into the audience.

CLARA A Novel; By Luisa Valenzuela; Latin Americana Literary Review Press: 192 pp., $14.95 paper

Clara the streetwalker is a ghost of a character inhabiting the shadowy margins of the big city she runs away to at 18. Almost immediately, her profession finds her, and she floats on its current, murmuring, “I sleep with men.” It is marvelous to see how morals tack people to their cultural and physical environments. When an author pulls out those tacks, the character floats, less controllable, through the world. Various sailors but not policemen, Don Mario, Victor, Carlos (ah, Carlos in the park!), Alejandro; each presents a different destiny until destiny seems a pale and rootless thing as well. Clara has as little tether to the world as Claire in “Undue Influence.” She sleepwalks from one day to the next, letting passion move the plot in the story of her life. The passion is always shallow epiphany. Her world is larger, but less well drawn, an unfinished building with no windows or doors. *

THE MASK CARVER’S SON A Novel; By Alyson Richman; Bloomsbury: 372 pp., $23.95

Yamamoto Kiyoki is the child of Noh. He is born in 1875 in Kyoto, seven years after the Meiji Restoration in which, among other things, “Japanese government and people rejected the ancient parts of their nation’s culture in favor of the new Western elements. Noh theatre became unfashionable.” Kiyoki has more past, more family history, than he has present personality. His personality, as we watch him grow up, unfolds like the very flower of destiny, firmly rooted in family tragedy and cultural tradition. His father’s parents both dropped dead when his father was a small boy after sharing an unripe plum he had picked for them. His mother died in childbirth. His father, a mask carver for Noh actors, is a lonely, wooden man. Moving to Paris to study painting, Kiyoki appears to abandon his heritage altogether. Falling in love with a fellow male student seems the least of his rebellions. This novel has many stories, many rooms, many generations. It has powerful metaphors--the mask, the plum, the painting, the mountains of Kiyoki’s childhood. It has a character who tries to rise above all of these elements and who, in the end, cannot.

RAILS UNDER MY BACK A Novel; By Jeffery Renard Allen; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 576 pp., $25

This is a version of the African American “Gravity’s Rainbow” in the free-associative style of “Ulysses” by James Joyce. It is the family story of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. It is a family structure that resembles a railroad, and it is the vehicle that takes the family north. Five generations hum along here, dividing by time and place and converging by love and tragedy. As a building, the novel is ambitious and rickety--it’s not the structure that is the problem, it’s the language, which, in many places (particularly modern-day) lacks the tendrils of reference and meaning that bind Joyce’s and Pynchon’s free-associating to the story. Some of these characters--No Face, Jesus, Lucifer--do a drugged-out babble in which every other word is “bitch” or “nigga.” A bit of this is OK. Twenty pages of it at a time, and I have a hard time believing anyone wants to claim this language as part of his heritage. But never mind--the scope and vision are what matter here, the views from the house that Allen has made are more important than its decorative, interior, linguistic furniture.