DISCOVERIES

THE WORLD BELOW, By Sue Miller, Alfred A. Knopf: 276 pp., $25

Readers raised in the less-is-better school of what we used to call “New Yorker fiction” have a certain a certain peculiar willfulness. They are used to making leaps, given a metaphor and a detail or two. No proselytizing, no moralizing, no exhausting adjectives and no long sentences, thank you. These readers will run headlong into Sue Miller’s insistence on spelling out every decision, every thought her generally solitary characters have. There is no humor and very little edge in “The World Below.” A woman, divorced from her second husband, leaves California for her recently deceased grandmother’s house in Vermont, where she spent a portion of her childhood after her mentally unstable mother died. Already, it’s a mouthful, and that’s only the beginning. In the Vermont house, she finds her grandmother’s diaries and is able to piece together the story of five generations, most especially the pivotal decisions made by her grandmother. She is called out of her reverie when her own daughter gives birth to an unhealthy baby, and she must fly home to California, to the future. In Miller’s prose, a leaping reader must confront how hard it is to write about a whole emotion, its source, its effect on a character’s life, and how--in this case--it is reflected in the dreary details of everyday life. The coffee is bitter, the coat is drab, the real estate agent is brassy. In so many ways we are trained, either by Faulkner or by our parents, that we can never really understand another human being. Sue Miller refuses to believe this. She refuses to write as if that were true.

SILENCE IN OCTOBER, By Jens Christian Grondahl, Translated from the Danish, By Anne Born, Harcourt: 296 pp., $24

And then there are silent novels, in which the distances between people--strangers, friends, spouses, parents and children--are explored. These novels often end with a kind of literary sigh, for if people remain forever distant, what hope is there for any form of communication, including the novel? Jens Christian Grondahl’s “Silence in October” opens one month after the narrator’s wife of 18 years leaves suddenly and with no explanation. The narrator believes that she will return, but in her absence, he looks back on a life so full of silences that he could be the distant cousin (twice removed) of Camus’ l’etranger. How could she leave with so little explanation? He wonders himself. “After all, we were both grown-ups,” he thinks of their unexamined life. This is a man afloat: He is estranged from his self-involved actress mother, estranged from his father, puzzled that his daughter uses him only for occasional fatherly advise and the occasional krone. Some of his silences resemble lies, as when he sees a former lover on the street and does not tell his wife her name. Sins of omission pave his path through life, and he is the first to admit it. Strange that a character could think so much about someone he was so little engaged with during 18 years of marriage. “Within a week,” he muses, “art of me had grown used to being alone.” Perhaps because he has always been alone. “I thought I was writing about Astrid, or about Ines and Elisabeth for that matter, but in fact I was only writing about myself,” he thinks in a rare moment, voicing a revelation the reader, magically, had 200 pages earlier.

RED: Passion and Patience in the Desert, By Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon: 258 pp., $23

This collection of stories and poems and testimony before Congress reads like a litany of every inspiration Terry Tempest Williams has brought to bear in her political efforts to gain protection for wilderness in Utah and throughout the West. The battle over public lands in the West, she writes, is nothing less than the Civil War. There is the landscape itself, which Williams has spent years describing, swimming and climbing and walking a path toward understanding the mysteries of red rock and slip rock and desert. “How can I convey the scale and power of these big wide-open lands to those who have never seen them, let alone to those who have?” Her intimacy with that landscape is complex and passionate: erotic, scientific, literary (one essay describes her devotion to Mary Austin, the turn-of-the-century author of “Land of Little Rain.”) and bona fide (Williams’ family has been in Utah for four generations). There is the strength of her convictions, enough to break with the Mormon Church, enough to disagree but remain part of her family of developers. The essay, “Red,” one of my favorites, includes a seven-page list of place names in Utah, from Little Goose Creek to Moon-Eyed Horse Canyon. She aspires to the slowness of the desert tortoise: “The desert is time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.”