DISCOVERIES

ALMOST

By Elizabeth Benedict

Houghton Mifflin: 288 pp., $24

I had an English professor once who insisted that the drama of human life was the struggle to gain control. Control of what? One’s self, surroundings, other people?

Sophy Chase is 44. She is almost divorced from her husband (an ex-CIA agent) of 10 years. She has a new boyfriend whose children like her. She has a new life in New York. Suddenly (we’ve only known her for a few pages), her life spins, thriller-like, completely out of control. Events come hurling at Sophy like meteorites and continue to hurl every 30 pages or so throughout the novel. Her husband dies. Is it suicide because Sophy left him? One of the boyfriend’s children begs her to live with them, then disappears. Sophy breaks a long period of sobriety to start self medicating in a big way. There’s a spiteful will, mean stepdaughters, most townspeople, a lawyer friend with a sex scandal all his own. Lives explode like Fourth of July fireworks. There’s so much action that you almost feel the author has abandoned the interior lives of her few central characters for the constant, churning movement of the whole. You need detectives, or a squad of therapists, to clean up this mess. A simple revelation, like the kind you might see in more literary novels, would not suffice. Sophy remains blank and unknown. Too many loose ends are left flying in the wind.

In the last pages, Elizabeth Benedict writes of the importance of happy endings: “[A]ll she wants to know,” Sophy says about one of her boyfriend’s children, who has woken with a bad dream, “all any of us want to know--is that there will be a happy ending, despite all the evidence to the contrary.” This is not exactly true.

*

I CANNOT TELL A LIE, EXACTLY

And Other Stories

by Mary Ladd Gavell

Random House: 224 pp., $21.95

These stories reach up their long spidery arms to drag a reader, spluttering and protesting, below life’s surface. Only one story, “The Rotifer,” was published before the author’s death in 1967, and it is a triptych, of three mysteries in the narrator’s life. In one the narrator regards the movement under a microscope of a rotifer (metazoa); in the next, she studies the papers of an 18th-century family with a son who mysteriously disappears from the family records; and in the third, the narrator contemplates her cousin’s mysterious marriage to an imposter.

In each section of the triptych and throughout the stories, the narrator is supposed to know something, to make sense of something she cannot. It’s a long spectrum a writer can choose from: omniscient narrator to observant narrator to disoriented narrator. Each offers a reader a response: trusting, suspicious, confused. Gavell’s narrators are observant, straining to make sense of what they see, self-conscious and powerless. “In the mornings Jane walked down the big front steps and the weedy flagstone walk and through the salt cedar trees to the road to wait for the bus, feeling conscious of her new school shoes and her new tablet and her long pencils.” That sentence, from “The Schoolbus,” captures perfectly the internal geography of Gavell’s characters. The question of the truth, that ghost in the house of fiction, haunts Gavell’s narrators. In the title story, Jimmy announces the night before the school play that he needs a George Washington wig. Together, the family makes one, also fulfilling one of Jimmy’s Cub Scout assignments: Family Night. The truth is built from a collection of facts. Many hands make light work.

*

ACCORDING TO QUEENEY

by Beryl Bainbridge

Carroll & Graf: 216 pp., $22

“Outside, though the air still hung heavy with the sour-sweet odour of fermenting grain, the thunderings and clatterings of the yard had stopped, and now, where once a dense head of steam had billowed to the city skies, only a thin scribble of vapour rose from the giant coppers of the Brewhouse.”

Beryl Bainbridge brings us to England, December 1784, and takes her crack at what history has left unwritten of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s life, in fiction. The author’s language, her use of addresses, her command of the varying moods of the skies over London give an authenticity and an authority to her vision of history. Her characters are collages of letters, papers, journals, novels and poems. Her Dr. Johnson has unforgettable ticks and surges. Queeney, the child prodigy, daughter of Dr. Johnson’s mistress, Mrs. Thrale, has a prodigy’s perfect reticence and hurtful irony. Her chambermaids and wet nurses are as inspired and important to the structure of the novel as Shakespeare’s were to his plays. “As she talked,” Bainbridge writes of a minor character, “she stabbed the air with one plump finger by way of emphasis, at her side the blighted cabbages whimpered in the breeze.”