DISCOVERIES

AFTERIMAGE By Helen Humphreys, Metropolitan Books: 246 pp., $23

Annie Phelan, a 19-year-old Irish girl, is hired as a maid in the English country estate of Isabelle Dashell and her husband, Eldon. Isabelle, loosely based on Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, is not taken seriously as a woman artist and photography, in 1864, is a fledgling, if not struggling, art. Isabelle photographs tableaux that re-create the stories that men tell about women: Medea, the Madonna, Ophelia, Guinevere.

Annie, orphaned by the Hunger in Ireland, helps Isabelle find new stories for her expanding set-pieces. Isabelle falls in love with Annie. Sappho, for example, becomes the subject of a portrait. Annie is a pure thing, with a real, dimensional human intelligence, and Helen Humphreys keeps her that way. Isabelle, the misunderstood artiste, is a little less believable and Eldon, her husband, a map maker, the sickly child-turned-adult who always wanted to be an explorer, is even more wooden. The life of an English country house, with its forced relations among classes, is a petri dish well-used by novelists. “Afterimage” has echoes of “Jane Eyre” and “Brideshead Revisited” and “Upstairs, Downstairs,” without achieving quite the depth of their socio-cultural analysis. But Annie carries us through the novel on her back, as a well-drawn character can.

THE LOVE-ARTIST By Jane Alison Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 242 pp., $23

Making an old story come alive is different from making a new story, if there’s still any such thing. “The Love-Artist” is a new interpretation of the life of the Roman poet Ovid and, as fiction, is an effort to make an old story come alive. Yet is it so wise, in the effort to reanimate characters from history, to use a gossipy insider tone? Basic, practical descriptions of their lives might pull a reader in faster. But Jane Alison brings us into the story of Ovid’s exile from Rome--and his love affair with Xenia, whom he took to Rome from her home on the shores of the Black Sea--in a conspiratorial tone, using a lot of adjectives about passion and very few about character. As a result, we are a little lost, swept into the story, flailing. It could be a beautiful novel. But if you are easily confused by the marriage of history and fiction and persist in asking how the story relates to the fact, you will be unhappy here. We might call it a kind of extreme fiction, this life of adjectives, a perilous uncertain place.

GARDENER TO THE KING By Frederic Richaud Translated from the French By Barbara BrayArcade: 118 pp., $19.95

It has become a comfortable cliche in literature that the upper classes must dream about their lost connections to nature while the lower classes roll around in the mud and weather. The garden at Versailles, presided over by head gardener La Quintinie in the year 1674, is in “Gardener to the King” the still point that Louis XIV returns to between conquests, and provides metaphors and wisdom on governing an increasingly restless country. Between the “virgin earth and sky,” and the “solitary birds,” the gardener can try to forget about the human race, a luxury the king does not have. Peasants and workmen suffer and die around him. The gardener chooses to return to the soil. “Gardener to the King” faces some of the same challenges as “The Love-Artist.” A reader wants to know what is fact and what is fiction. The salvation of gardening is made real in Frederic Richaud’s novel. The class struggle and the relationship between the king and his gardener are not.

SEEK Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond By Denis Johnson HarperCollins: 256 pp., $23

If you had a friend visiting from the planet Xenon who wanted to better understand American culture, where would you take her? McDonald’s? What would you tell him to read? Harper’s? As in every other culture, there’s “us” and then there’s “us.” “Us” is foreign policy and fast food and literary journalism. “Us” is what we fear, what we expect from life and how we behave when we fail. What do we look like wasted? Ashamed? Denis Johnson writes often about the margins of American culture. Yet even his most suburban readers can recognize the fears of his characters, often hippies and other rebels. Why? Because they are looking for something and they don’t know what it is. With each generation it is buried more and more deeply in our American soul. In these essays, his characters pan for gold, attend Christian biker rallies and join militia groups, looking for something they were promised a long time ago. They do the same thing in his fiction. Is it freedom?