DISCOVERIES

THE FRUIT OF STONE

By Mark Spragg

Riverhead: 304 pp., $23.95

“And Bennett is his best friend, and Gretchen is Bennett’s wife.” There you have it: the plot of this tumbleweed novel, which picks up bits of story and stray characters as it wobbles down the road after Gretchen has crawled into “his”--McEban’s--bed to say goodbye.

In the end, Gretchen is so much less important than the lifelong friendship between the two men that she is reduced to a trail of letters. McEban is likable in spite of the lie at the middle of his life; he is a man who remembers and dreams, mostly about Gretchen. Bennett gives the novel its punctuation: He is an unpredictable picker of fights, a barroom brawler, a howlingly rejected man. Gretchen leaves him, not for McEban but for a physicist. McEban and Bennett, two bozos, go looking for her. McEban says goodbye to Ansel, who has worked on the ranch all his life. He is the novel’s home base, the character who holds the Wyoming landscape in his smile. We bump along in the pickup from Cody to Jackson to Bozeman as McEban remembers his childhood, his mother and father and grandmother. All this jostling on the tumbleweed trail between past and present is a little jarring.

Wyoming, it seems to me, is the great rodeo for western writers, each struggling to describe its fabled sky in a different way: “There are pads of cloud, their edges windtorn to scallop, a handful of them thrown up before the sun.” That same landscape can make a craggy, gnarled mess of a neat plot: too much metaphor and the novel leaks; too little poetry and the sky is just a lid on another western novel, where explanations are scarce and distance sets the tone.

*

OYSTER

By John Biguenet

Ecco: 288 pp., $23.95

New Orleans is a region unto itself, neither north nor south, east nor west, an exotic, esoteric land with its own religion and a firm, if good-natured, adherence to class. The rule of law is always a bit questionable, and murder is way too easy when a person feels slighted, at least in fiction.

Mathilde Petijean is a young girl from one of two prominent oystering families in this Louisiana town. She has been promised, though it is 1957, to the older head of the rival clan, Horse Bruneau. Horse gets his nickname from his god-given equipment. He has two no-account sons and one decent son. Mathilde, a regular Femme Nikita, murders Horse rather than marry him. In retaliation, the Bruneau boys murder her brother, who they believe killed their father. The sheriff, who is always turning up on the scene but never has any answers, doesn’t have the evidence to lock them up. Mathilde takes the law into her own hands.

“Oyster” clips along, made fascinating by the ins and outs of oystering and by John Biguenet’s wonderful descriptions of Louisiana bayou cuisine. Competition over oyster beds, and leases for those beds, quickens as the oil companies drone on in the novel’s background, cutting up the bays and estuaries and making it harder for the fishermen to earn a living. The desperation that lights up the novel smolders in Mathilde. She is the character who brings the satisfying vengeance, who alters history and grabs her own fate. She is the stuff of fiction.

*

LAND’S END

A Walk in Provincetown

By Michael Cunningham

Crown Journeys: 176 pp., $16

It’s a small territory to cover, but Provincetown bursts at the seams with gossip and lore and sex. “It is the only small town I know of,” writes Michael Cunningham, who has lived there on and off for 30 years, “where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the proscribed boundaries of home and licensed marriage, respectable job and biological children.”

Since 1620, when the Mayflower landed in Provincetown (but did not stay), the town has been populated by outcasts, and this is what Cunningham, who is from Southern California, loves. A haven for artists, Provincetown counts as its citizens and visitors over the last century luminaries such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Milton Avery, Edmund Wilson, Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver and Mark Doty.

Built on constantly shifting sand, it nonetheless feels like the safest place in the world to Cunningham, a place where you will not be judged for strange behavior or sexual habits. A regular night in the summer will end around 3 a.m with hundreds of people out on the sidewalk after the last bar and, finally, the last pizza and ice cream place has closed. The town today “is something like an elderly bohemian who once knew people of great influence, who still dresses eccentrically, still lives in defiant poverty, still paints or sculpts with heroic optimism, and flirts only on bad days with bitterness about having been gifted and dedicated and having been left behind.”