DISCOVERIES

You don’t see novels like this one very often. “Peace Like a River” reminds a reader of Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong” or even Norman MacLean’s “A River Runs Through It.” It’s got that pure American loss of innocence theme, that belief in and fascination with miracles, that insistence on the goodness of men outside of the law. The children are wise beyond their years and their father can do anything. As a family, they follow a moral code higher and more binding than any government’s. The narrator, Rueben Land, was born in 1951 in Minnesota. He and his older brother, Davy, and their sister, Swede (the writer in the family), are raised by their father, Jeremiah, worker of miracles. Rueben does quite a lot of philosophizing, and he explains the nature of miracles early in his account of the family’s travails: “Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.... A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.” Swede is a compelling, mysterious 8-year-old who speaks in a kind of Zane Grey saloon English. When Davy’s girlfriend is attacked by two ruffians in the girl’s locker room who are intercepted by his father (the school janitor), a feud begins that ends with Davy shooting the boys. He’s defending his sister, but the police don’t seem to care about that. When Davy escapes from prison and disappears, Jeremiah takes his other two children and heads off across the Great Plains in a 1955 Plymouth wagon, pursued by the “putrid feds,” to look for Davy. Miracles happen along the way. By the end, life itself seems miraculous and strange: from the fact of breath to the possibility of justice.

THE APPOINTMENT, By Herta Muller, Translated from the German by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm, Metropolitan Books: 224 pp., $23

“I went through all the possible ways of getting fed up with the world,” explains the disaffected Romanian clothing factory worker early in this uniquely Eastern European novel. “The first and the best: don’t get summoned and don’t go mad.... The second possibility: don’t get summoned, but do lose your mind.... The third: do get summoned and do go mad.... Or else the fourth: get summoned but don’t go mad.” She has been summoned for sewing notes into the men’s suits that are sent to Italy; the notes say “Marry me,” giving her name and address. “Instead of an Italian,” she thinks, “I landed the Major,” referring to her inquisitor, the man who summons her for questioning several times a week. “The Appointment” is full of the desperation of life under tyranny (Herta Muller herself fled Ceaucescu’s regime.)The will for self-preservation looks a lot like heartlessness; the desire to flee, fueled by childlike dreams of a better life, consumes the narrator’s consciousness. “I wanted to go to the kind of beautiful country the clothes were exported to. I wanted to be worth clothes like that.” The disoriented sense of self and of the value of human life leads to a surreal imagery: “The white sofa in the sky, the pharmacist in the aquarium, the linden seeds ... after the old shoemaker died everything seemed out of control.” There is a colorful dream layer underneath the world of the novel. It’s vivid power lies in bleak contrast to gray daily life and to the narrator’s powerlessness.

UPHILL WALKERS, A Memoir of a Family, By Madeleine Blais, Atlantic Monthly Press, 272 pp., $24

“Up was the anthem of the fifties,” writes Madeleine Blais in this memoir of growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Holyoke, Mass. “It meant progress, prestige. It implied hard work and inevitable rewards.” Blais’ father, a dentist, dies when Blais is 5, leaving her mother to care for four girls, one boy and a baby on the way. They live in a big white house in the center of town, the kind now inhabited by New England’s dot-comers. Blais’ mother is a trouper who idolizes the Kennedys and longs for Ireland. She tries gamely to raise her girls with that profound understanding of status objects: suits from Bests & Co., diamonds from Tiffany and correct behavior: “Ladies do not swing their arms when they walk. No one should butter his or her bread in the air.” Blais’ brother, Raymond, a schizophrenic. Blais survives by reading: “I read because the world seemed various and dangerous and complicated, not alphabetical.... I enjoyed a little dirt with my uplift.” Blais is an excellent camera, writing in snapshots that capture the feeling of an era, using her mother as the main character. “My mother,” she writes, “never should have been a housewife in the fifties, one of the more diabolical decades ever invented, especially for women, with its combination of self-abnegation coupled with bizarre domestic competitions involving canned soup and dried onions and frozen string beans.”