DISCOVERIES

AN INVISIBLE SIGN OF MY OWN

By Aimee Bender

Doubleday: 246 pp., $22.95

Aimee Bender’s collection of funny stories, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” concealed their barbed observations of modern life in the ha-ha-oops-help-uh-oh style of humor. Her first novel, “An Invisible Sign of My Own,” also contains ha-ha-oops, but there’s a lot more uh-oh. There’s also time, this being a novel, for the aaaahh. The Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass main character, Mona Gray, is a 20-year-old who loves numbers and teaches math to second-graders. One of her students, 7-year-old Lisa Venus (whose “hair was so ratty, it barely moved when she did”), also loves numbers. Her mother is dying of cancer, and her cry for help is the soundtrack of this novel. “She told me my class was already her favorite class,” Mona explains, “and that if I really wanted to do something for her, then I should not get sick, ever.” It is a plot full of clues, most of them numerical, designed to tell Mona what the right thing to do next might be, a novel that resembles a mad croquet game, played in the mystical thicket of everyday life. *

LIFE IS A MIRACLE

An Essay

Against Modern Superstition

by Wendell Berry

Counterpoint: 154 pp., $21

*

Those of us who love and respect and cut our philosophical teeth on Wendell Berry (he was my generation’s Scott Nearing) will read everything he writes. But sometimes I worry that the rest of the world might not understand that Berry, philosopher, iconoclast, ethicist, believes--from personal experience and from a lifetime of listening, studying and farming--that he knows what will make us happy. He writes, especially in his essays, about what will make us unhappy as if he has no sympathy for human frailty or our terrible urge to self-destruct.

In this book, Berry repeats some of his most important axioms: We should not think we are God, particularly when it comes to creating and destroying life; there are mysteries we cannot solve with our minds; machines should not dictate our behavior or our evolution; and community is more than place, it is a condition of the spirit. “The dominant tendency of our age,” he writes, “is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that were once joined.” This is the message, but the structure of the book is a very long rebuttal to the ideas of scientist E.O. Wilson as they appear in his book, “Consilience.” There is a smugness about science and its power that irritates Berry to no end. Irritation is how pearls are formed. *

ANA IMAGINED

By Perrin Ireland

Graywolf Press: 194 pp., $22.95

*

What a courageous first book. Its subject, a young woman, Ana, struggling to keep herself and her son alive in war-torn Sarajevo, is hard enough. But the novel also has a complicated structure: A woman in Cambridge, Mass., Anna, writes a novel about another woman, Ana, whom she has seen on the news. The two women’s lives (Ana’s as imagined by Anna) reverberate in thought, word and deed. Both were raped and struggle to have normal relationships in the lifelong aftermath of rape; both have sons they worry for; both are intellectuals. But the thing that ties them together is not rational or even capable of being parsed. Perrin Ireland has created a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Trading voices throughout a novel--particularly using italics to indicate one of the speakers--can and usually does seem artificial, but perhaps the context of war, which can make the obvious and familiar endearingly normal, makes this gimmick work for Ireland. More likely, it is the author’s conviction that a faraway war tearing lives apart in Sarajevo also rends the fabric of our lives. *

TEN WOMEN WHO SHOOK

THE WORLD

by Sylvia Brownrigg

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 126 pp., $18

*

Sylvia Brownrigg writes like she’s muttering to herself. But wait, this is actually entertaining, because it is like watching a beautiful swimmer. It places the reader up on the high dive, looking down as Brownrigg swans through the shallow water, down to the depths of subconsciousness and back up again, not only breathing but also laughing. With Brownrigg, we can go from crash-dieting to the metaphor of Christ in the desert without having to take a four-year course in the meaning of life. I like that in a writer. She is distracted and distracting; her narrators range from Amazon women creating the pyramids and the Taj Mahal to trees in the forest (“Bob turns gold in Autumn when he’s happy”). Her collection of stories has something of the feel of aliens talking in a bar in the commissary of the starship Enterprise. But it also has its quirky wisdom. On the American West: “Though you’re a little girl you have understood the fantasy that is the West. The freedom to own and to travel. The freedom to imagine yourself all alone.”