DISCOVERIES

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS By Anne Tyler Alfred A. Knopf: 274 pp., $25

Sometimes it seems that all of fiction is an effort to explain the lives of women. A woman’s life is the crucible of culture. All the sad and happy mothers, all the homes with their secrets, all the families held and fed and frightened by the rage and anguish and pushing of the female off the fulcrum of sanity, the stable hearth. Who can write a woman’s life?

In “Back When We Were Grownups,” Anne Tyler, veteran novelist, brings herself to this proving ground. Write the life of a woman in her 50s with children and now grandchildren, the still point at the center of a family in which “nothing ever flowed from start to finish without interruption. Their lives were a kind of crazy quilt of unrelated incidents,” writes Tyler of this family she has woven out of nothing particularly extraordinary. “When she was a girl,” Tyler writes of the novel’s main character, Rebecca, “she had imagined her future as a single, harmonious picture.”

But who can ever really pull it off? Meal after meal, year after year, watching the children make the same mistakes we made, over and over into perpetuity? So abjectly dull, these details of a woman’s life. More and more I respect the writers who, having proven themselves on more exciting ground (like Jayne Anne Phillips or Doris Lessing or Virginia Woolf), go back to try to create, as Woolf did, their own Mrs. Ramseys, their own Clarissas, to ask the question: Who was that woman, my mother? Must we always be so unhappy? Must we pass this unhappiness on into perpetuity?

Like Clarissa in “Mrs. Dalloway,” Rebecca makes parties, though she makes a living doing it, running a catering business she started with her husband, who died in a car wreck six years into their marriage, leaving Rebecca with four daughters. Like Clarissa, Rebecca remembers back over decades to a young man she loved, a young man who more than anything reminds her of her own long-lost self.

If I could only get a glimmer of myself as a girl, I could be myself again--these heroines think--leaning into the past. I could look for that old self, and I could love her as she is and was. I could love her so well, she wouldn’t need the love of a man, so much that it ruined every relationship she ever had with a man. And then, and then we could teach our daughters the same self-love. And everything would be different. “Her dream was the kind that lingered,” Tyler writes of Rebecca in reverie, “coloring the whole morning.” Every morning. Every day. Every family. Everywhere.

BIG AS LIFE Three Tales for Spring By Maureen Howard Viking: 228 pp., $23.95

“One man loved the pilgrim soul in you”--Yeats’ tribute to the power of the yearning soul buried in daily life--is brought to mind reading these three tales of spring, a triptych of art and nature and morality. It is the pilgrim soul that Maureen Howard unearths in each of her characters, however buried, however unconscious. These are ghost stories, stories of layered lives through which shoots of promise, talent and desire grow toward the light of day. In the first panel, April, the medieval-minded daughter of a banker and amateur naturalist, haunts and is haunted by the great house she grew up in. In “May,” the one religious child in a Park Avenue-Long Island, F. Scott Fitzgerald-style family burns for the Virgin while all around her shed their morals like so many dying leaves. In “June,” the life of John James Audubon becomes a map for the members of a modern family as they struggle to make art out of their lives and the island nature around them.

The civilizing efforts of naturalists to draw their subjects or make gardens out of forests or of well-meaning socialites to submerge the wild passion for God in a young girl with convent training and book learning pale in Howard’s stories beside the forces of nature and the coming of spring.

FRAUD Essays By David RakoffDoubleday: 226 pp., $21.95

Not as smart alecky or long-winded as David Foster Wallace, not as cold hearted and remorselessly funny as Dave Sedaris and not as gut-spillingly funny as our own Sandra Tsing Loh, David Rakoff is nothing less than a mole in the House of Normalcy. In his Eeyore observations of machismo, new age sincerity, socialist youth camps and New York publishing, Rakoff spares no one. Sometimes he forgives his subjects for allowing themselves to be victimized by such a geeky journalist. More often, he lets them hang. After he’s eaten their entrails and stepped on their ancestors’ graves.