DISCOVERIES

THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF Stories By Russell Banks; HarperCollins: 506 pp., $27.50

“His story was like a prayer,” Russell Banks writes of a lie his estranged father once told him, “like all good stories, but it went unanswered. The one to whom he prayed--not me, but an angel on the roof--was not listening.” We tell stories to make people love us, he writes, hoping that some angel will make them believable. These stories perch on the rim of memory, that shadowy realm that makes Banks’ novels, like “Rule of the Bone,” so powerful. They are filled with images of frozen water, bars and old houses. The characters are ice fishermen, djinn and remembering men in various stages of life. “Listen to me,” Banks writes in the seemingly autobiographical story “The Visit,” about a 35-year-old man, afraid as he revisits a childhood home and enters rooms that once contained violence, “you are locked into that narrative, and no other terms, except those present at its inception . . . are available for the reversal--and, oh! when that happens,” Banks writes, “I overwhelm my dead father’s rage with an awful, crippling, endless rage of my own.” Without Banks’ rage, a childhood of lies posing as stories, we would never be blessed by Banks’ prodigious talent and insight.

ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY By David Sedaris; Little, Brown: 224 pp., $22.95

Mercy, MERCY! David Sedaris is dangerously funny. You have to love the Hitler-esque French teacher and the American tourists who take him for a “froggy” in the metro. You have to love him as a boy with his lisp and his speech therapist, whom he calls Agent Samson. No hand-wringing, either, for growing up gay in suburban America, as he did. There are enough lisping boys in his school, he notices, that the sign on the therapist’s door should have read “Future Homosexuals of America.” In college, he joined the “Bong Studies Program,” where he discovered “both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things,” he writes, “is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.” “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is the story of Sedaris’ efforts to learn French in Paris with a “saucebox” fury of a teacher. “We soon learned to dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs,” he writes of his fellow students. “Huddled in the hallway and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. ‘Sometimes me cry alone at night.’ ‘That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you.’ ‘Much work and someday you talk pretty.’ ‘People start love you soon.’ ‘Maybe tomorrow, okay.’ ” “Everywhere you turn,” Sedaris complains of American culture, “the obvious is being stated.” But his great and tender wit complicates the obvious and makes it funny.

CARP FISHING ON VALIUM By Graham Parker; St. Martin’s Press: 256 pp., $22.95

Brian Porker, not exactly lovable except for a brief window at 13, is a druggie on the fringes of the music world, a guy with no furniture and no real ambition except to replace Mick Jagger when he dies. Aimless youth has been the subject of some wonderful quirky novels recently, but this is not one of them. No arc, man. No denouement. A few of the stories stand out; Porker’s fragile revelation, age 13 that killing is no fun (upon watching a fledgling bird die); a Lorena Bobbitt-like episode in which his irritated wife cuts off his nose after enduring weeks of his head cold-induced snoring; and the title story, which actually slows to a hilarious crawl as two friends consume Valium while fishing and the narrator’s palette dims like Monet’s lilies shifting from dawn to dusk after each pill. Here the writing is smooth, but in several stories it flops awkwardly in the shallow water of the stories’ plots.

SAFEKEEPING Some True Stories From a Life By Abigail Thomas; Alfred A. Knopf: 182 pp., $22

Short story fragments that cohere throughout a collection, either through the characters, the voice of the narrator or even place, are among my favorite branches on fiction’s family tree. The writer has to be very confident, restrained and well-versed in the subconscious aquifer that helps vastly different readers understand and enjoy stories that do not offer a lot of helpful detail. Otherwise they are incoherent and self-indulgent. “Safekeeping” is a sapphire of a collection--pointy, gleaming, in the end blue. It tells the story from several facets of a woman who had three children in her early 20s with her first husband, married two more and lost the one she finally loved. You know a form is right when, in the end, you can’t imagine a story told any other way. Abigail Thomas walks the edge of the form’s boundaries her stories are haunted by adjectives.