FICTION

All Is Vanity, Christina Schwarz, Doubleday: 368 pp., $24.95

Margaret and Letty, educated, resourceful urban women in their mid-30s -- best friends since childhood -- feel the weight of the years passing, with only meager accomplishments to show. Time, they believe, is running out in “All Is Vanity,” an enthralling, satirical novel by Christina Schwarz (“Drowning Ruth”). Both women know instinctively they’re not mediocre people awash in a sea of humanity: They’re special. Cloaked in incisive wit, the novel is a tragedy in the classic sense.

Margaret, living in New York, quits her job teaching English to write the great American novel, certain that a year off work will transform her into a literary success. Letty, a West Los Angeles mother of four small children, thinks that if she can keep pace with the upper-middle-class families of her social circuit -- the right haircuts for the kids, the right house -- she’ll be the stunning wife and mother she was meant to be. In this funny yet touching tale, Schwarz deftly delineates the tragedy of the human condition. When it comes to overthrowing egotism and the green-eyed monster of envy, there’s a bit of Letty’s covetousness and Margaret’s rash ambition in us all. Self-knowledge, in the long run, avails us nothing.

Bernadette Murphy

*

Ambassador of the Dead, Askold Melnyczuk, Counterpoint: 266 pp., $25

Askold Melnyczuk’s “Ambassador of the Dead” brings the dark, fabled world of Ukraine, with its brooding passions, to the shiny, optimistic streets of America in a triumph of style and storytelling. His masterful book begins ominously: The narrator, Nick Blud, a Boston physician, receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the beautiful mother of his childhood friend Alex, whom he hasn’t seen in years. Adriana summons Nick back to his New Jersey hometown, telling him she has something urgent to relate. As he sits in her living room awaiting her revelation, he begins to meditate on his past: “In different ways I had loved all the Kruks -- they were my little Russian novel, so impulsive and uncontainable, you never knew if they were going to kiss you or bite you ....” The same could be said of Melnyczuk’s writing. He skillfully re-creates the post-World War II immigrant neighborhood of Nick’s youth, where Ukrainian families alternately struggle to assimilate and be true to their heritage. Nick’s family is all for the New World, but the Kruks, led by the mysterious and powerful Adriana, cling to their past. Though Nick and Alex attempt to blend in with the American landscape, neither can escape the otherworldliness of Adriana. She is a country all to herself, the compelling heart of the story. Melnyczuk’s “Ambassador of the Dead” is an eloquent meditation on the human need for a rooted historical perspective. His ambassador, Adriana, invites comparison to one of the tempestuous Karamazovs. With her, he has brought the great tradition of Russian literature to American soil.

-- Scott Morris

*

Anna in the Afterlife, Merrill Joan Gerber, Syracuse University Press / Library of Modern Jewish Literature: 124 pp., $22.95 paper

Merrill Joan Gerber is not only one of our most underrated contemporary writers, she also may well be our least pretentious. Her utter lack of pretense is a major source of her raw power as a writer. In her latest novel, a tough little gem called “Anna in the Afterlife,” Gerber returns to one of her most memorable characters, Anna Goldman, the forceful, discontented mother of the young heroine in “An Antique Man,” more recently glimpsed in her 80s lying immobile, resentful and furious in a nursing home in the story collection “Anna in Chains.” Now, after seven years in the chains of her illness, Anna finally dies. The opening whisks us into the world-weary mind-set of its heroine: “Once her dying got underway, Anna could not really complain about how the process moved along.” Like Saul Bellow, Gerber has a genius for the irritable, the acrid and the embittered: The visitor from another planet who doesn’t know what it means to kvetch would need to look no further than Gerber’s fiction for superb illustrations of the phenomenon. Unlike Bellow, she does not venture far beyond the personal. Her eyes are trained on the quotidian, but the acuity and intensity of her vision are no less extraordinary.

Merle Rubin

*

At the Jim Bridger: Stories, Ron Carlson, Picador USA: 194 pp., $23

Contemporary stories and novels about the American West have developed certain conventions. There is a down-at-the-heels motel on a poor road at the edge of a wind-worn town. Its manager, an aging man with a dubious past, sits on a folding chair watching the flicker of the TV. Outside, a car pulls up on the gravel. A couple comes in and rents a room. A plot ensues. It unfolds and, in the end, flings the characters back into the rootless past from which they blew in. Ron Carlson’s nine stories and two stream-of-consciousness bits in “At the Jim Bridger” contain some of the conventions. There is a joint called the Blue Bird. There is a motel in Arizona called the El Sol. There are characters whose pasts are indistinct. But Carlson goes beyond the conventions to create characters who in their strangeness become suddenly rich with life, their situations lying just beyond the edges of commonplace existence. Carlson’s most ambitious story is the title piece. In its complexity, it is really a novella. In the mountains at the Jim Bridger Lodge, named for the mountain man and scout, a man who is with a woman, not his wife, has told her of getting caught in a blizzard on an earlier mountain trip, and how he and another man, saving themselves in the storm, experienced an almost involuntary but powerful erotic encounter with one another. Carlson tells that story with both delicacy and force. This collection of stories about people in the uncertain moral terrain of the American West consistently surprises and delights.

-- Anthony Day

*

Atonement, Ian McEwan, Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 358 pp., $26

For decades now, Americans have been on the lookout for the Great American Novel, a work of fiction that captures the essential truths about the way we live now. We elevate one writer after another -- first Don DeLillo, then Jonathan Franzen -- in the belief that the American sensibility is the best lens for viewing the human condition in the 20th century, or the 21st century, for that matter. Yet such a thought only reveals the brazen Yankee conviction that we are the center of the world. Ian McEwan makes quite clear just how foolish this assumption is, having written in “Atonement” what might be called the Great British Novel, a book that invites us to look at the particulars of modern English history and the cataclysmic changes that have, willy-nilly, shaken up our Western notion about the inviolable nature of cultural norms. What he has to say about social bonds, familial allegiance, uncensored libido and base aggression leads the reader to an empathic perspective that extends well beyond his immediate shores. “Atonement” is a work of vaulting ambition that just also happens to be a page-turner. The novel teems with musings on the unforeseen quirks of causality, the multiplicity of selves that reside within a single character and the writerly desire to wring a coherent fiction out of the chaos of reality. It also, not insignificantly, contains one of the more erotically charged scenes I’ve read. In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, it made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.

-- Daphne Merkin

*

The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith, Random House: 352 pp., $24.95

Zadie Smith stormed onto the publishing scene in 2000 with “White Teeth,” a burly first novel that embraced the 21st century with its zesty portrait of ethnic, class and sexual conflicts in multicultural London, taking side trips as far afield as Jamaica and Bangladesh. It’s a pleasure to report that her latest book is just as stimulating. “The Autograph Man” mingles such quintessentially contemporary themes as our obsession with fame and the substitution of entertainment for experience with time-honored subjects like the tangled bonds between fathers and sons and the inevitability of death. All are considered with the same bracing intelligence and salty humor that distinguished her debut. Tracing her hero’s odyssey, Smith scatters marvelous sentences and sharp insights on nearly every page, astutely placing many of them in the mouths of her characters. The fact that Smith’s reach sometimes exceeds her grasp indicates how bold that reach is. She tackles big subjects, and her talent is very nearly equal to her ambitions.

-- Wendy Smith

*

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley, Little, Brown: 312 pp., $24.95

Few sequences in modern crime fiction are as breathtaking and poignant as the final moments of Walter Mosley’s 1996 novel, “A Little Yellow Dog,” when Mosley’s hero, Easy Rawlins, and Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, his partner of some 20 years, are ambushed in a blind alley in South-Central Los Angeles. With a few deft strokes, Mosley brings the world to its knees. It’s 1963. JFK’s just been assassinated, Los Angeles has come of age and, in a hail of gunfire, Easy and Mouse find themselves fighting for their lives. It’s a familiar moment, only this time everything goes wrong. Mouse gets hit, and in their escape, Easy watches his best friend slip away. Is it any wonder Mosley took six years -- and six other novels -- before telling us what happens next? Some things you just don’t walk away from.

With “Big Bad Brawly Brown,” a story with the same imaginative vigor and the same unflinching honesty as its predecessors, Mosley continues to put a strong claim on urban crime fiction, a claim that says as much about the city of Los Angeles as it does about America at large. In his success, he once again leaves us eager for more.

-- Thomas Curwen

*

Baudolino, Umberto Eco , Translated from the Italian by William Weaver, Harcourt: 522 pp., $27

Umberto Eco’s “Baudolino” manifests many of the exuberant extravagances that made “The Name of the Rose” so hugely enjoyable. The novel is the story of Baudolino, an Italian of poor origin who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th century Holy Roman emperor. The tale is his life story as told to Niketas, a Byzantine nobleman whom Baudolino saves during the sack of Constantinople by forces from the West in 1204. He tells of wonderful things, in particular how he became a liar and discovered that the lies he told became true or better than true. Eco twists the braggart’s narrative because not only is Baudolino a liar, he also knows he is a liar. It consequently becomes a very Eco-ish game in that we are reading a fiction about a fiction that often contains yet more levels of fiction. The author is engaged in a continuous subversion not only of the forms of the historical novel -- which depends on a sort of contract between author and reader that disbelief will be suspended for the duration even when the period being described is well-known -- but also of our engagement with any sort of narrative at all. In so doing, of course, Eco is making a point about the nature of belief itself and giving an insight into the medieval mind, which had no effective theoretical or practical means of checking information to see whether it should be credited or not. It is quite a disorienting experience and very effectively done. There is a vast amount of information and entertainment here and, in the end, the reader capitulates to Eco’s demands and wallows in it as someone in the Middle Ages would have done: with all the critical faculties shut down, simply relishing a good yarn.

Iain Pears

*

The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster, Henry Holt: 336 pp., $25

“Everyone thought he was dead.” With seeming transparency, Paul Auster opens “The Book of Illusions,” his 10th and most affecting and virtuosic novel. Auster has always packed a library of imagination into his novels, and illusion has always projected its tantalizing images on the cave walls of his writing. His Cartesian musings on life, death and the many illusions the living must fabricate to keep the sputtering reels of their lives turning have been integral parts of his voice throughout his many novels, from the collegiate fantasies of “Moon Palace” to “Timbuktu,” whose hero is the canine companion of a schizophrenic. But in “The Book of Illusions,” an older and wiser Auster has added a new ingredient to the metaphysical play and deft storytelling, a sadness that colors all illusion, that creates a stunningly moving and very real portrait of a man over-marked by death. The marvel of “The Book of Illusions” is that it is no mere metaphysical exercise. The novel packs the weight of a human heart between its dramatic covers. It is the memoir of a man who died, a man who disappeared when his wife and his sons fell out of the sky and lost the right to touch his loved ones. It is a story of unspeakable grief told with virtuosic brilliance, which Auster finally brings safely to Earth with a very human simplicity.

-- Jonathan Levi

*

Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros, Alfred A. Knopf: 448 pp., $24

It has been nearly 20 years since Sandra Cisneros’ acclaimed first novel, “The House on Mango Street,” a coming-of-age story told in poetic vignettes, brought her unique voice and the Chicana experience to millions of American readers. High school and college students in particular found her first novel authentic and simpatico. Her 1991 short story collection, “Woman Hollering Creek,” offered a wider range of voices, a broader scope. With “Caramelo,” her exuberant, overstuffed new novel, she undertakes storytelling on a grand scale, detailing the struggles and joys of three generations of a family that bridges the Mexican, Mexican American and American experiences during the momentous migrations of the last century, evoking a subtle panorama of cultural shifts. Its characters leap from the page in all their flawed humanity, falling in and out of love, squabbling and making up, working hard and making do. Like Eduardo Galeano, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck, Cisneros writes along the borders where the novel and social history intersect. She is particularly gifted at showing how the ebb and flow of history affect those previously marginalized: the poor, the immigrants, the women who have been traditionally without a voice in literature. In this lovingly told and poetic novel, she uses the storytelling art to give these voiceless ones a voice, and to find the border to the past, imbuing the struggles of her family and her countries with the richness of myth.

-- Jane Ciabattari

*

The Cave, Jose Saramago , Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Harcourt: 308 pp., $25

“The Cave” is an allegorical novel alive through its details -- its mulberry tree and dog, its van and potter’s kiln -- but judiciously unspecific as to physiognomy and place, so that the characters’ faces and their city may be filled in with the thought of our own. Jose Saramago’s long fluid sentences, richly stocked with folk wisdom, swerve through psychology and the physical world with equal assurance and lend his novels a rare quality of permanence; it’s as if only a story confirmed in its shape many times before could be so confidently told.

Benjamin Kunkel

*

Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 242 pp., $23

One winter afternoon in Queens, circa 1960, Theresa, the 15-year-old narrator of Alice McDermott’s wondrous new novel, takes her little cousin Daisy to a candy store. They buy 100 lollipops and bring them home to Daisy’s siblings -- six brothers and a skeptical sister, who asks, as any child would, “Where’d you get these?” Before Daisy can answer, Theresa is inventing a sugary but morbid fantasy about an old couple whose only child, 50 years ago to the day, dreamed of a lollipop tree in his frontyard at dusk and then suddenly died. Each year on the anniversary of his death, in the brief February hour between daylight and dark, the couple hang lollipops on their front willow for the neighborhood children.

Like William Trevor, McDermott is a genius of quiet observation. Her antenna is perpetually raised and turning, humming and warm with reception. Her novels possess a satisfying sameness, in the same way that Jane Austen’s novels share certain similarities in content and tone but are uniquely enchanting.

And as with Austen, McDermott, one of our finest novelists at work today, is the master of a domain that in the hands of most writers would be limiting. In “Child of My Heart,” she has transformed her trademark material of Irish American life into a poignant and rewarding fictional world. “Child of My Heart” extends her artistic triumphs, and we should rejoice.

-- David Ebershoff

*

The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth , Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, W.W. Norton: 282 pp., $27.95

The mark of a Joseph Roth short story is the leap into a kind of magical elegy. The pain of loss is everywhere in his work, especially in the stories collected here by Michael Hofmann, his adept translator. Roth the writer emerged from the rubble of a lost world, the world of Europe before World War I, where everything was known or knowable and nothing would ever change -- or if it did, never for the worse. And then, in the blink of an eye, an archduke was assassinated and the whole elaborate artifice fell apart. Roth has made that historic moment into a psychological moment too, for his characters: Loss of innocence goes along with loss of home, or of homeland. His fictional terrain is a land of specific places -- the bad corners of certain cities, squalid little villages near bigger villages, train stations along the way, town squares, parks and cemeteries -- in a world where all the reasonable maps have been lost or, worse, burned. To read this seductive collection is to be invited into a writer’s notebook -- a very great writer’s notebook. The book has some of the odd pleasures one might have gotten looking into Proust’s trash can. It bobsleds down from the pristine summits of perfect, resonant storytelling to the very depths of artistic raveling and exasperation.

-- Amy Wilentz

*

The Conquest, Yxta Maya Murray, Rayo/HarperCollins: 288 pp., $24.95

Sara Rosario Gonzalez is a 32-year-old restorer of rare books at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles who unexpectedly finds herself on the verge of a heartbreak, but as Yxta Maya Murray shows in “The Conquest,” the human yearning to overcome loss can sometimes be the inspiration that leads to great art. When Sara’s high school sweetheart, Marine Capt. Karl Sullivan, announces his engagement to another woman and wants Sara to let go of him, she lures him back into her bed by doing what she does best: Like Scheherazade, she reveals to him piecemeal the content of a manuscript she’s working on: the saga of a female Aztec juggler abducted to Europe in 1528 by Hernan Cortes after he overthrew the Aztec empire and won Mexico for the Spanish crown. The untitled folio, which Sara calls “The Conquest,” is more than a gambit for Karl’s affection. It becomes Sara’s attempt to give a voice to her ancestors and to all brown women; in the process, she will rediscover her own mestiza identity and confront the transgressions of the Old World upon the New. But first, there is something of a mystery to be worked out concerning the authorship of the manuscript.

From her first novel, “Locas,” to “What It Takes to Get to Vegas,” Murray has taken a major step as a writer in “The Conquest,” creating a hybrid garden of literary intricacies that might have amused even Jorge Luis Borges. “The Conquest” tackles the excruciating question of how to redress loss, whether it be in the form of a 500-year-old conquest that has deprived the indigenous people of the universe as they knew it, the loss of a lover or the gradual erosion of one’s cultural identity in the modern world.

-- Salvador Carrasco

*

The Crazed, Ha Jin, Pantheon: 330 pp., $24

Ha Jin, author of the 1999 National Book Award-winning novel, “Waiting,” a quiet love story dancing between human and political tensions as set against the backdrop of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, continues to mine this rich and historically relevant territory in his newest work, “The Crazed.” In spare yet radiant prose, Jin depicts the daily existence of Jian Wan, a young man whose life is neatly ordered.

A graduate student in literature at remote Shanning University, Jian has been studying diligently under his beloved mentor, Professor Yang, in preparation for the entrance exams for the doctoral program at Beijing University. Once he passes the exam, he’ll be reunited in the capital with his fiancee, Meimei (Professor Yang’s daughter), who’s in Beijing preparing for medical school. Their lives will then unfold as predictably and comfortably as can be expected: he as an intellectual, balancing the exigencies of art with the circumspection required under the Communist regime, she as an ambitious physician. At least that was the plan before Professor Yang suffers a stroke just weeks before the exam and Jian is expected, as “the only family Professor Yang has here,” to care for him every afternoon. Initially, the only thing disrupted by the professor’s illness is Jian’s study plans. It’s difficult to get much intellectual work done while sitting in a mangy hospital room, listening to the rantings and hallucinations of one’s professor. The more Professor Yang indulges his outbursts of singing, poetry reciting, raving against communism and speaking to people not there, the more Jian is pulled into the mysteries of his professor’s life.

Left deliciously ambiguous by the author are important questions: Are Yang’s railings only figments of a damaged mind, delusions not to be trusted, or is Yang finally speaking the truth in a country where honesty and defiance are harshly punished? Is Yang the “crazed” of the book’s title, or is it the society in which he lives? In this slow-moving but beautifully layered tale, Jian must decide the nature of truth for himself. Repressive politics, treachery and hunger for power, viciousness and desperation are at the heart of this tale, which Jin balances tenuously against the redemption of love, the importance of art and the vital need for narrative to make sense of our lives and our suffering.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter, Alfred A. Knopf: 672 pp., $26.95

Stephen L. Carter’s “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is a remarkable novel. A member of the Yale Law School faculty for more than 20 years, Carter has written a number of scholarly works, none of which hinted at his gift for fiction. “The Emperor” is so rich in detail about a particular segment of American society that it could have been written only by someone with unusual access to the subject and by someone with extraordinary powers of observation and expression. Carter has both.

As with all serious literature, “The Emperor of Ocean Park” grounds its most important relationship in truths that transcend matters of race. Like John Cheever and Philip Roth, Carter confirms that above a certain tax bracket, race or religion does not make Americans crazy. Money, advancement, prestige and power do -- and the need to own and possess in a society where nothing is free, not even ambition, not even a father’s love. Carter is wise enough to define his book on these terms, above all others.

-- Jonathan Shapiro

*

Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer, Houghton Mifflin: 276 pp., $24

Jonathan Safran Foer, the 25-year-old author of this remarkable first novel, was the editor of an anthology of writings devoted to American artist Joseph Cornell. The temptation to compare the brimming, tidbit-strewn and delightful “Everything Is Illuminated” with one of Cornell’s curio-filled boxes is impossible to resist: They both demand and deserve to be considered repeatedly and from varying angles; they provoke laughter as easily as they elicit curiosity. Yet “Everything Is Illuminated” is more than an oddball object. It’s probably the first convincing report from Generation Y (for lack of a better label) on the legacy of the Holocaust. It’s a powerful document, telling the story of Jonathan Safran Foer (the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s) and his idealistic search, during the summer before senior year in college, for Trachimbrod, the vanished Ukrainian shtetl where his grandfather somehow escaped the Nazis. Entwined with this search, in alternating chapters, is Jonathan’s work-in-progress, a precociously surreal novel about Trachimbrod from 1791 to the day the bombs came down in 1941. With its multiple narrators, spiraling layers of jokes and breakneck shifts between hilarity and horror, with its Nabokovian aura of mischief-making, with its sidelong glances at post-Iron Curtain capitalism and contemporary anti-Semitism and, with its daringness to show that irony, in the right hands, still has the power to enlighten, “Everything Is Illuminated” is a veritable box of treasures.

-- Mark Rozzo

*

Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry, Alfred A. Knopf: 440 pp., $26

Rohinton Mistry’s title is nicely ambiguous. Is “Family Matters” noun-verb or adjective-noun? In Bombay’s Parsee society, family clearly matters a great deal. But coping with the actual matters -- emotional, financial, medical, psychological, physical -- that family relations impose, too often, as Mistry shows in devastating detail, wears away the love, replacing it with sour distaste, unacknowledged fear, simmering resentment and sheer desperation. Hopeless dreams breed bizarre and fantastic solutions. Remembered wrongs poison the mind. Kinship becomes a burden, the ties of blood an arbitrary imposition. Poverty exacerbates every problem and hones the fine edge of hysteria. The tentacles of family relationships, like mother-in-law jokes and quarrels over wills, are universal, and, as the collected fiction of Ivy Compton-Burnett amply testifies, having a reasonable amount of money doesn’t always let you off the hook, either. Those characters in “Family Matters” who, near the end, are rescued by a Dickensian-type windfall soon start working up a new set of irritations. What enriches “Family Matters” are the minor characters and lovingly described scenes of daily life: Here Mistry frequently put me in mind of Vikram Seth’s vast Indian panorama, “A Suitable Boy.” He includes fascinating descriptions of Zarathustrian temple ritual (and of the complex socio-religious taboos that impinge, sometimes devastatingly, on these characters’ lives). The scene in which Daisy, the downstairs tenant and first violin in the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, keeps her promise to play for Mistry’s central and largely passive character, Nariman Vakeel, on his deathbed is, against all odds, genuinely moving.

-- Peter Green

*

Fox Girl, Nora Okja Keller, Viking: 290 pages, $24.95

Disturbing, riveting and necessary is Nora Okja Keller’s “Fox Girl,” the tale of throwaway children and prostitutes stranded in the aftermath of the Korean War. Following up on her first novel, “Comfort Woman,” in which Keller mined the same difficult terrain of war, sex and power, “Fox Girl” tells the distressing first-person account of Hyun Jin, a young Korean girl on the cusp of maturity whose face is inscribed with a large birthmark and whose mother shows her nothing but contempt.

A brutal coming-of-age tale, “Fox Girl” is devastating. Through Keller’s use of crisp writing, razor-sharp metaphors and utter narrative command, we witness the destruction of Hyun Jin’s innocence by greed, bad luck and forces beyond her control, as she, like innumerable others, becomes yet another unacknowledged victim of war. Still, her spirit continues to demand a better life. Told in stark, painful, sexually graphic and heart-rending images, “Fox Girl” is a story that haunts, with scenes that replay long after the book is closed. Steel yourself before opening the pages, but, surely, open them. This is a vital, urgent work, reminding us not only of the horrors of war but also how “only Americans believe in happy endings.”

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

Ghost of a Flea, James Sallis, Walker & Co.: 238 pp., $23.95

James Sallis has a knack for pairing the laconic with the metaphysical, the cozily quotidian with the surreal. His eighth tale, “Ghost of a Flea,” draws the reader into a strange and richly populated universe. In twists and turns of bizarre incident and poignant human encounters, the story traverses the alleys and gator-tail joints, bars and hospital wards of one man’s New Orleans -- a city ragged with the violence that proceeds from poverty and entrenched inequality, populated by homeless loners who fight back with whimsy, madness and wit. It bears the marks of a fierce and original writer working at full power. The penultimate chapter explodes on the page, extending strands of light that tie together previously unconnected elements with stunning clarity. And still it’s not over, for there is one more short chapter to go, only the length of an afterthought, and yet, with the power to rotate this whole fictional universe, leave it suspended upside-down long enough for the reader to race back to the beginning of the story and ride it again.

-- Kai Maristed

*

The Girl From the Coast

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Translated from the Indonesian by Willem Samuels

Hyperion East: 282 pp., $22.95

A survivor of the Japanese occupation during World War II, a soldier in the Indonesian Revolution, a political prisoner of the Suharto regime for 14 years, Pramoedya Ananta Toer is one of the 20th century’s great voices of conscience. This new translation of “The Girl From the Coast,” a novel written and first published (in serial form in a newspaper) in 1965, is a major contribution to the growing body of Pramoedya’s works in English. It was written while Pramoedya was at the height of his creative powers, a commanding intellectual figure in the twilight years of the regime of Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding ruler.

Set on the north coast of Java at the end of the 19th century, the novel is a sort of pre-autobiography, telling the story of Pramoedya’s grandmother. A nameless 14-year-old girl is forced by her parents into an arranged marriage with a rich aristocrat, known as the Bendoro. A simple fisherman’s daughter, she overnight becomes the lady of her husband’s household. After she adjusts to her new life, she becomes pregnant, only to discover that she is a “practice wife” who will not only be discarded by the Bendoro but also will be separated from the child she is carrying. It is a classic tragedy, enacted with tremendous, restrained gravity, in Willem Samuels’ polished, lucid translation. Pramoedya achieves his most devastating effects by discreet, elliptical indirection, a defining Javanese trait.

-- Jamie James

*

The God Who Begat a Jackal

Nega Mezlekia

Picador USA: 256 pp., $23

Nega Mezlekia left his native Ethiopia in 1983 and chronicled his boyhood there amid upheaval and famine in the widely praised memoir “Notes From the Hyena’s Belly.” In his first novel, Mezlekia returns to his homeland but goes back even further, to the 18th century, when Ethiopia was still Abyssinia. This is an Africa rarely glimpsed: not quite colonial and not yet modern. Mezlekia’s Abyssinia is both feudal and ancient, pagan and biblical, and it often bears uncomfortable parallels to our own time. His story is about a clandestine affair between a young court entertainer named Gudu, born of slaves and with a precocious flair for language, and Aster, the only daughter of the imperious Count Ashenafi. “The God Who Begat a Jackal” is a tall tale imbued with documentary detail and the weight of history, and its story lines are as ancient as they are timeless.

-- Mark Rozzo

*

Gould’s Book

of Fish

A Novel in 12 Fish

Richard Flanagan

Grove Press:

404 pp., $27.50

Surely one of the most eccentric novels to appear in recent years, “Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish” by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, rivals other ambitiously weird fictional works of our time. From David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” to Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon,” fictional high fliers have attempted to slip free of sturdy old realism by summoning the odd alternate universe, always running the risk that readers will be distracted by the little man behind the curtain, frantically working the machinery that supplies the magic. “Gould’s Book of Fish” is such an experiment: by turns enchanting, bemusing and irritating. What’s memorable -- even extraordinary -- about this book are Flanagan’s aphoristic talent, his imagination and his uncanny ability to channel the Rabelaisian voices of the great picaresque writers -- Fielding, Sterne, Smollett. This strange writer remains unique, one of the novel’s most ambitious talents, one whose every book commands our attention.

Caroline Fraser

*

The Green Hour

Frederic Tuten

W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $24.95

The title of Frederic Tuten’s fifth work of fiction identifies that wonder working interval when Parisians resort to cafes to seek a heightened or at least an altered state of being wrought by the verdant transformations of “Lethe’s livid absinthe.” Thus the reader is alerted to the probable nature of the present elegant fable, its desperate readiness to discard the conventions of realism, although this author’s previous books, in their different ways, had served similar notice from the start, which was “The Adventures of Mao on the Long March” 20 years back. Then came “Tallien: A Brief Romance,” which disposed of the French Revolution in 150 pages of mordant frivolity; then Tuten’s masterpiece to date, “Tintin in the New World,” which persists in the analysis and futility of revolution in terms of figures from the old French comic strip; and six years ago, “Van Gogh’s Bad Cafe,” whose romantic personnel steps out of those sun-baked oils, foreshadowing some of the cultural and academic altercations of this new book. I suspect that the readers this exceptional writer deserves (he is frequently elegant and always intelligent in his spiritual accounting; his arguments for and against the course of passion and the life of the mind, no less) will be startled and perhaps daunted by the strange elisions of naturalism for the sake of philosophical position, and then by the even stranger forsaking of Goya versus Poussin (the running academic argument throughout the timeless “Green Hour”) for the sake of what directors call stage business. As Browning says, “What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?” Yet Hawthorne would have abounded in the sense of this grim little romance, with all its exotic filler (scenes of Parisian extravagance and Manhattan prodigality), for the sake of its spooky radiance, for its intensities of conduct in the war between life and art, and love and death, and between knowing and believing. Once again, Tuten reaches for another kind of fiction -- a lyric condition of the downward spirit, in its mysterious connivance with its own wreck.

Richard Howard

*

The Hermit’s Story

Stories

Rick Bass

Houghton Mifflin: 180 pp., $22

Men and women reaching blindly for love, stumbling into and through intimacy, finding their way when the ground on which they’ve built their lives becomes liquid under their feet: This terrain of exposed human emotions is staked out by Rick Bass in his strong, gorgeously crafted collection “The Hermit’s Story.” Through these rustic tales, Bass brings us deep into nature, where ice, snow and fire, wolves and coyotes endanger our lives, yet where swans and deer, ice-crusted lakes and hidden caves mark the entrance to a mystical understanding. Bass shows us, through crystalline images of the physical world, an intangible kind of grace -- the blessings nature bestows when we’re least expecting them. An affirming, resounding collection, “The Hermit’s Story” reveals Bass as a master craftsman, sparkling in the diamond-motes of his descriptions and the rawness of the human heart.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

Homo Zapiens

Victor Pelevin

Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

Viking: 250 pp., $24.95

“Once upon a time in Russia there really was a carefree, youthful generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea and the sun, and chose Pepsi.” So opens Victor Pelevin’s latest and best novel, “Homo Zapiens,” the Homeric odyssey of a young poet trying to make his way through the brave new world of post-glasnost advertising. Pelevin’s hard-boiled wonderland of a Moscow sits well next to Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Julio Cortazar’s Paris and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. All four writers have sci-fi-sized imaginations, literary backgrounds and, most important, fierce grasps of their own morphing cultures and languages. If Pelevin’s Moscow is less sexual than the other capitals (remarkable, given its reputation), that is only one more surprise from this writer who continues to be one of the most energetic and imaginative voices to reach our Western antennas.

-- Jonathan Levi

*

Iceland

Jim Krusoe

Dalkey Archive: 182 pp., $14.95 paper

Reading “Iceland,” Jim Krusoe’s slim and surreal first novel, is rather like watching a gifted, self-assured magician perform a routine in which the audience’s willing-suspension-of-disbelief threshold is constantly being reset higher and higher. It shouldn’t work. It can’t work: Too many ironclad laws of fiction writing are being casually violated on every page. Then, miraculously, the author pulls it off, and you’re left feeling dazzled, even breathless. This is literature at its most audacious and imaginative but also at its most coolly controlled. Krusoe is stylistically daring without being self-consciously avant-garde; he’s laugh-out-loud funny but never lapses into contrived jokiness. Moreover, “Iceland” manages to be that rarest of things: a novel of ideas that’s unpretentious and great fun to read. Somewhere up in heaven, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and John Gardner are looking down and smiling proudly. Krusoe may be a magician, but it turns out he’s one of those subversive magicians who delights in exposing the artifice behind our cherished illusions. In this case, the illusion he punctures is that each of us is destined to be with someone else, the mystical “soul mate” of Plato and poetry. In the last pages of this amazing novel, he paints an almost Sartre-like picture of a man alone in the universe, connected to no one but himself, belonging nowhere but inside his own head. Comic surrealism gives way to a poignant depiction of a hard truth too often lost on troubadours: The thousands of roads down which we travel lead us, ultimately, to no one’s home but our own.

-- Jeff Turrentine

*

Ignorance

Milan Kundera

Translated from the French by Linda Asher

HarperCollins: 196 pp., $23.95

Since the fall of communism, Eastern and Central Europe have been living in the time of returns. The region is supposed to be returning, after decades of Soviet-imposed hibernation, to its legitimate place in Europe and in Western civilization. There is a rush of returning exiles, sometimes exiles’ children, who spent the better part of their lives abroad. Returning to this hitherto fatalistic domain are the very notions of the future, of second chances, of free choice but also of envy, loneliness and moral ambiguity that can no longer be blamed on the “political system.” All those returns, and the tricks played by memory on people and nations in transition, are the subject of “Ignorance,” the new novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera -- by far his most successful since “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” In “Ignorance,” which tells about the impossibility of returns, he makes his own successful return to familiar ground and to his old literary excellence. His irony and wit are back on target, his characters vivid and convincing, his intelligence no longer groping for a topic. So welcome back, Milan. Yes, this is still your home -- it seems you cannot do without it.

-- Jaroslaw Anders

*

Life of Pi

Yann Martel

Harcourt: 336 pp., $25

Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” is the literary version of a large, friendly dog; hardly has it committed some mild offense than it rebounds with such enthusiasm, impishness and charm that one promptly forgives it. The book concerns the life of Piscine Molitor Patel (self-christened Pi), an Indian boy growing up in Pondicherry in the 1970s. Pi’s father is the director of the zoo at the Pondicherry Botanical Garden, and the family lives within the idyllic, hothouse peace of the zoo grounds until at last, in 1977, the political situation in India forces them to sell off their animals and move to Canada. On their way to Toronto, their ship -- a Japanese cargo ship carrying, among other things, a Bengal tiger from the Pondicherry zoo -- sinks, and all members of the Patel family, excluding Pi, are lost at sea. A pocket summary of “Life of Pi” doesn’t quite do the book justice, however, because despite its constant episodes of tragedy and suffering, the story is written with a lightness and humor that gives it the quality of a fairy tale. It is a testament to Martel’s talent that his narrative never drags despite the fact that the movement of time in “Life of Pi” is almost undetectable. All incidents take place in a kind of vacuum, and in the hands of a lesser craftsman, they would seem scattershot and random. What draws us on is not plot in any chronological sense but rather the profound, infectious sense of wonder that runs the length of the book. “Life’s” peculiar, slightly dreamlike cast eventually carries the reader to the last of Pi’s trials, a brief sojourn on an island floating, apparently unmoored, in the middle of the sea. In a few short pages, Martel sketches a cankered paradise that, in its quiet horror, rivals the best of dystopian fiction. Equally haunting is the aftermath of Pi’s ordeal, the surprise of which shouldn’t be ruined here. Suffice to say that the ending contradicts the statement, made twice in the book’s introduction, that “Life of Pi” is “a story to make you believe in God.” Like Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” it is instead a story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators, and in the original power of storytellers like Martel.

-- Francie Lin

*

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

Little, Brown: 330 pp., $21.95

The mere whisper of their names is painful -- Polly Klaas, Danielle van Dam, Elizabeth Smart, Shanta Johnson -- for they represent a parent’s unspeakable heartache and a nation’s vicarious nightmare. They are the little girls, and girls are most at risk for such mayhem. Some eventually are found dead; others simply disappear. We read their stories, hear the soundbites and wonder: What really happened to these lost girls? How on Earth do their families survive the horror? How would we bear such a tragedy in our own households? They are questions to which we seldom find answers, turning back ultimately, gratefully, to our happier-by-comparison lives. Alice Sebold, however, boldly steps into that unimaginable territory in her first novel, “The Lovely Bones.” Sebold’s guide on the journey is 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who tells us she was murdered in 1973, “before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons ... back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.” It is an oddly affecting coming-of-age novel, the story of a girl who travels from the land of the living, through the in-between space of her personal heaven, to a “wide wide Heaven” where she can finally let go, “hold the world without me in it.” Indeed, letting go is a leitmotif of “The Lovely Bones,” one that Sebold evokes with a sly inventiveness and lyrical power that are deeply moving and ultimately redemptive. With a well-balanced mix of heavenly humor, Earthbound suspense and keen observation of both sides of Susie’s in-between, Sebold teaches us much about living and dying, holding on and letting go, as messy and imperfect and beautiful as the processes can be -- and has created a novel that is painfully fine and accomplished, one that readers will have their own difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned.

-- Paula Woods

*

Man Walks Into a Room

Nicole Krauss

Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 256 pp., $23.95

High-diving gamely into the pool of amnesia literature is Nicole Krauss, whose first novel, “Man Walks Into a Room,” is a startling tale of a man so desperate for memories that he is willing to borrow someone else’s. The amnesiac owes his unique place in our fictions to our curiosity about memory’s relationship to identity and to tantalizing questions about existential culpability: Are we anything more than walking, talking accretions of empirical data? Are we morally responsible for acts we don’t remember committing? Playing around with the tropes of amnesia allows a writer to remove a character’s overstuffed personal filing cabinet and see whether there’s anything like an actual soul hiding behind it. It’s a device that must tempt every novelist, though the rules of verisimilitude (the condition is actually extremely rare) have frightened many of them off and effectively pushed these stories to the fringes of genre fiction. Krauss, however, isn’t intimidated, and her novel is as clever and poignant as it is fearless. It begins as noir, detours into an Updike-like study of a doomed marriage, then veers off toward paranoid sci-fi before entering the home stretch as a mournful kaddish. “Man Walks Into a Room” is swirling with curious ideas and enticing paradoxes. Krauss has written a novel that, unto itself, is hard to forget.

-- Jeff Turrentine

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 530 pp., $27

Myths, whether ancient or modern, are basically designed to take the vexing mysteries of the universe and reformulate them as stories that make human sense. Jeffrey Eugenides has only two books to his name; nevertheless, he’s well on his way to becoming a spectacular mythologist, attacking some of our most enduring riddles with heroic energy, keen wit and genuine compassion. In his first novel, 1993’s “The Virgin Suicides,” the riddle had to do with the incomprehensibility of grief: how the bereaved secretly envy the dead and long to join them. (What were the Lisbon sisters of that novel but lip-glossed suburban Pleiades whose self-destruction only made their stars shimmer that much more brightly?) In “Middlesex,” his long-awaited follow-up, the riddle is identity: how it develops, how it’s enforced and how gods and grandparents conspire to devise it long before we’re born. In significant ways, “Middlesex” -- a transatlantic epic about a star-crossed Hellenic family, narrated by an engagingly ironic hermaphrodite -- is the formal opposite of “The Virgin Suicides.” The latter was taut almost to the point of astringency, though shot through with a dreamy, nocturnal surrealism. Eugenides has had nearly a decade to relax, and the happy result is a novel that’s as warm, expansive and generous as its predecessor wasn’t. “Middlesex” is a towering achievement, and it can now be stated unequivocally that Eugenides’ initial triumph wasn’t a one-off or a fluke. He has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.

-- Jeff Turrentine

*

A Multitude of Sins

Stories

Richard Ford

Alfred A. Knopf: 292 pp., $25

Richard Ford, who was raised in Mississippi and has spent a lot of time in Montana, has hunted all his life. In the 10 cautionary tales in his third collection of short stories, “A Multitude of Sins,” Ford brings a hunter’s steady, subtle and precise observation to an exploration of the commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” All senses alert, the writer tracks the behaviors of America’s wandering unfaithful through the motels and hotels and bars where they come to grips with their passions. There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor here, in the harsh wit and preoccupation with good and evil, in the author’s willingness to let characters seem shallow, even despicable. But Ford has moved beyond the small-town South to encompass the comedy and pathos and wit of our dislocated times, the rhythms of the workaday world and the emptiness that comes at the end of the day to the lobbyist, the lawyer, the retired cop who dreams of starting over again in East Whatever, Maine. With “A Multitude of Sins,” which reminds us how powerful short stories can be, Ford delivers a piercing look at the ways men and women deceive and disappoint each other.

-- Jane Ciabattari

*

Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon

Doubleday: 256 pp., $23.95

Sarajevo-born writer Aleksandar Hemon’s debut, “The Question of Bruno,” (2000) was widely praised by critics -- even earning the author comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov -- and with good reason. Hemon’s stories, chronicling the immigrant experience, were satirical, painful, absurd and wrenching; they were all the more remarkable for having been written in English, a language the author had only recently adopted. In his best moments, Hemon proved himself as inventive a writer as Nabokov or Salman Rushdie. He seemed, in other words, to possess the kind of bold talent that doesn’t come around very often. And his follow-up book, “Nowhere Man,” reintroduces readers to Jozef Pronek, the hapless protagonist of “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” from “The Question of Bruno.” Here Jozef’s entire life is laid out in a scattered, episodic fashion, related by unreliable narrators and skipping back and forth in time. Hemon again displays his prodigious gifts; nearly every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit.

-- Carmela Ciuraru

*

Passing Strange

Sally MacLeod

Random House: 310 pp., $23.95

Pungently erotic, searingly violent and ultimately tragic, Sally MacLeod’s ambitious novel is a high-wire act, and she writes with such devil-may-care abandon that you get the sense that she has no need for a safety net. “Passing Strange” is a novel about plastic surgery, infidelity, the New South, class resentment and interracial sex. It’s part “Madame Bovary” and part bus-station novel. And its heroine, Claudia, is a melancholic soul who’s as recklessly willful as she is disturbingly passive. Born to a white working-class Vermont family and painfully ugly, Claudia somehow snags a well-born New York WASP husband, a lovable frat-boy jackass. When the unlikely couple decide to move to North Carolina, he arranges radical surgery for Claudia, and she is transformed, at least on the outside, into a beauty: “this unearned esteem would weigh on me, and paw at me like the hand of a beggar.” Once in North Carolina, the new Claudia is stunned by the local black population, by “rear ends like Lycra-coated melons.” When she starts meeting Calvin, the black yardman, for illicit encounters in an abandoned farmhouse, she is “perfected,” and all hell breaks loose. With its sexual obsessions, “Passing Strange” dares us to call it racist, but each page is full of brave truths about everything from love, desire and family to strip malls, country clubbers and even -- when this daring novel heads for home -- the death penalty.

-- Mark Rozzo

*

The Piano Tuner

Daniel Mason

Alfred A. Knopf: 326 pp., $24

Burmese legend tells of the spirit, leip-bya, that flies at night outfitted with the wings of a butterfly, according to a character in “The Piano Tuner,” the luminous, dreamscape novel by Daniel Mason. “When a man sleeps, the leip-bya flies from his mouth and goes about here and there, and sees things on its journey, and these are dreams,” Mason’s character explains. “The leip-bya must always return to a man by morning. This is why the Burmese don’t want to wake sleeping people. Perhaps the leip-bya is very far away, and it cannot return home fast enough.” Told with the competence of a seasoned storyteller in almost old-fashioned prose, “The Piano Tuner” begins in 1886 London when Edgar Drake, a quiet, keep-to-himself piano tuner with a great love for Erard pianos, is summoned by the British War Office. In service to the Crown, Drake is told, is one Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, currently holding a provisional peace in the southern Shan States of war-torn Burma. Some months earlier, the surgeon-major had requested a rare 1840 Erard grand piano be delivered to the compound. The military is highly suspicious of the eccentric doctor-soldier’s methods but is nonetheless convinced of his success in keeping the peace. Though greeted with derision, his piano requisition -- really an ultimatum, Drake learns -- was filled in order to keep the good doctor happy enough to continue providing his valuable services. (Carroll soothes the local warlords with poetry, medical care and music, thereby earning their trust and cooperation.) Once the piano arrived, though, it was painfully out of tune and damaged from the arduous journey via elephant. Thus, the doctor requires the services of an Erard expert, which is where Drake comes in. “It’s much easier to deliver a man than a piano,” Carroll has written in his request.

Mason’s writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified. The scenes are rendered with resolute command, alive with lush metaphor, even if at times Mason’s plotting is a bit heavy-handed; we sometimes know what’s coming by his blunt foreshadowing. The moments of awkwardness pass quickly, though: One dream scene makes way for the next until, ultimately, Drake becomes stranded in the Burmese world of dreams, his leip-bya so far afield that he cannot be awoken.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

Prague

Arthur Phillips

Random House: 374 pp., $24.95

Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about the Lost Generation of Americans who flocked to Paris after World War I, pursuing stimulation beyond the bland boundaries of Middle America. In “Prague,” Arthur Phillips focuses on a new “lost generation” seeking financial and personal fulfillment in post-communist Eastern Europe. His young English-speaking expatriates land not in picture-perfect “cash lavished” Prague but in Budapest, “this God-forsaken paprika-stained Austrian test-market,” also known, more flatteringly, as “Paris on the Danube.” Phillips’ novel has scope, historical perspective and complexity. His characters, who beach in “plucky, unlucky Hungary” in 1990, just one year after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, are more strivers than drifters and more jaded and cynical than their earlier Parisan counterparts. They are members of the “triumphant generation” who won the Cold War. They dream of glistening, beckoning Prague but remain in Budapest. In relaying the hardships suffered by his Hungarian characters, Phillips provides a pointed contrast to his disaffected Americans. Phillips, who lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris, shows an expatriate’s ability to see his fellow Americans from a critical distance. The result is a substantive book that braves the cliches of expat ennui to consider such issues as sincerity, scruples and the vicissitudes of history.

-- Heller McAlpin

*

Red Poppies

Alai

Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

and Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Houghton Mifflin: 434 pp., $25

“Red Poppies” is perhaps the first magical realist “Tibetan” novel to reach the Western market. The publishers claim it is a book that does for Tibet what the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez have done for Colombia. But a more direct parallel -- and a more illuminating comparison -- might be to Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” “Red Poppies” has neither the stature nor complexity of “Midnight’s Children,” but is it, as presented, a Tibetan novel, or is it a hybrid? “Midnight’s Children” is a post-colonial novel about India written in English. “Red Poppies” is a novel set in a pre-colonized Tibetan district, written in Chinese. “Red Poppies” stands on its own literary merits, accessible to the reader without the historical background or even a precise geographical fix on the novel’s setting. It stands up to comparison with other examples of contemporary fiction in China -- where magical realism is enjoying a vogue, and Alai has demonstrated that he can move from the short story to the long form without losing his grip.

-- Isabel Hilton

*

Red Water

Judith Freeman

Pantheon Books: 336 pp., $24

It must be every bride’s nightmare -- going home to meet your new husband’s seven other wives. But in Judith Freeman’s “Red Water,” set in the Mormon West of the 1850s and ‘60s, it’s only to be expected. Emma Batchelor, English emigre and convert, marries the charismatic John D. Lee, a real-life leader in the early church, and moves to a remote settlement in the red lands of the Great Basin in this tale of the sweat- and blood-soaked West. Moving fluidly backward and forward in time, the novel opens in an especially solemn and graceful piece of writing with Lee’s execution by firing squad for a crime that is never directly addressed. His mysterious crime hangs over the rising action like the threat of a winter storm. “Red Water” delivers an unforgettable portrait of the unceasing labor, passion and danger of frontier life, recalling the best of Willa Cather. Freeman makes vivid the ferocity it took to wrest a living from a wild red land and makes inevitable the intensity of life among people who try. Her evocation of the Great Basin, its harsh landscape of red rock and twisted cypress and winters that come like an apocalypse forms the perfect stage for this drama of love and faith and greed at the edge of wilderness.

-- Janet Fitch

*

The Seal Wife

Kathryn Harrison

Random House: 230 pp., $23.95

After circling the dark secret of her incestuous relationship with her father in her first two novels, “Thicker Than Water” and “Exposure,” Kathryn Harrison confronted her demons head-on in the memoir “The Kiss.” Anyone who’s read this eviscerating memoir about her affair with her father won’t be surprised by the icy intensity of “The Seal Wife.” Harrison is a beautiful stylist, a master of spareness in the service of over-the-top obsessions. She is skilled at seamlessly incorporating research into tales of sexual compulsions. She is drawn to things that make most people squirm -- whether incest, foot-binding or her daughter’s lice, which she wrote about in the New Yorker. Her trademark is to examine these repellent subjects minutely, without flinching, until she transforms them through craft and precision into objects of morbidly beautiful fascination. Harrison is a writer who might make you gasp but rarely will make you laugh. But the most surprising aspect of this mesmerizing tale about passion’s capability to empower and deflate is Harrison’s subversion of our worst expectations.

-- Heller McAlpin

*

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

Ismail Kadare

Translated from the French of Jusef Vrioni by David Bellos

Arcade: 192 pp., $23.95

What is Albania? During the mid-1980s, our image was of a country hunkered down behind the inscrutable wall of its Communist tyrant, Enver Hoxha. Albania was the Tibet of Europe, swathed in fabrics of language and culture unidentifiable to the uninitiated. The war in Kosovo changed all that. CNN taught us that Albania was part of the Balkans, that its people were part of a larger European Muslim population (who knew there were Muslims in Europe?). But what did we learn of Albanian culture, of Albanian writing? Ismail Kadare, born in 1936, has spent a life fighting the twin enemies of Albania: totalitarianism and superstition. As a storyteller, with a breezy fluency, he solves his mysteries with a political and mythical flair that includes an image of Leonid Brezhnev and the blind Oedipus Rex stumbling out of the agora like a pair of vagabonds from a Bob Dylan tune. At the end, gods and demons gone, the protagonist of “Spring Flowers, Spring Frost” looks to the sky, “a sky bereft of its masters, a sky in mourning stretching to infinity.” It is an Albanian sky that looks much like our own.

-- Jonathan Levi

*

The Story of Lucy Gault

William Trevor

Viking: 228 pp., $24.95

“Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one.” There is something ripely short story-ish about the opening sentence of William Trevor’s novel, “The Story of Lucy Gault.” The single shot suggests a single plot -- a tale of revenge, perhaps, with the precise date of a police blotter, fixed at a distant point in history, an age of exotic names like Everard Gault.

But it is a mark of Trevor’s widely acknowledged mastery of the numerous ways the English language can affect and manipulate the human mind that he is able to turn this single shooting into a complex and thoroughly extraordinary novel. Eventually the distinction between perpetrator and victim, actor and acted-upon, fades as time moves the story out of the mists of a past of dim communication into a present age of telephones and e-mails. What remains is tragedy, stubborn and unyielding, struggling for satisfaction -- and the brilliant heroine that Trevor has created in Lucy, as strong and solitary as Bronte’s Cathy and Sophocles’ Antigone, but 10 times as resilient. A survivor. The search for reconciliation, for a lasting peace, is as elusive, as Irish and Catholic as it is human and Earth-wide. But the poetry of Trevor’s novel is aimed above politics, even if it strikes fully at the heart.

-- Jonathan Levi

*

The Strength of the Sun

Catherine Chidgey

Henry Holt: 272 pages, $23

The eerie beauty of a solar eclipse. The nocturnal dance of fireflies. The gleam of gilded letters in a medieval manuscript. The haunting look of a photograph that, on closer inspection, dissolves into a lifeless pattern of black and white dots. A house destroyed, then rebuilt. The diary of a teenage girl who disappeared. The volatility and resiliency of the material world itself, the world in which we live and die.

These are some of the images, objects and concepts from which New Zealand writer Catherine Chidgey has woven the shimmering fabric of her second novel, an exquisitely written, curiously tantalizing book that looks something like a mystery story but is something far more evanescent. Deftly, in almost painterly fashion, Chidgey arranges her images and themes in a balanced, aesthetically pleasing composition. “The Strength of the Sun” is a beautifully crafted, often poignant work.

-- Merle Rubin

*

Tishomingo Blues

Elmore Leonard

William Morrow: 308 pages, $25.95

Elmore Leonard’s characters live in a world in flux and, to their minds, almost anything is possible. We read his stories to see what happens next, but they surprise us with terse, poignant glimpses of our land and certain figures moving through it. If we peer hard at those figures, we may see exaggerated versions of ourselves: people trying to get from Point A to Point B in one piece, with a certain amount of grace. How to rate the 37th novel by an author who’s in a class by himself? Compare it to his previous work? “Tishomingo Blues” is funnier than “Cuba Libre” but not as droll as “Get Shorty.” Its mise-en-scene isn’t as hip as “Be Cool’s,” but it’s more fun than “Stick’s.” This novel is less poignant than “Pagan Babies,” but it’s more moving than “Maximum Bob.” In other words, “Tishomingo Blues” is typical Elmore Leonard. Who could ask for anything more?

-- Tom Nolan

*

Tourmaline

Joanna Scott

Little, Brown: 288 pp., $23.95

Joanna Scott is one of today’s best novelists, and she keeps getting better. As a writer, she plays with traditional narrative without being obscure or outrageous. Her details are placed in their settings like gems in fine jewelry -- each has several facets: the beautiful, the dangerous, the ominous and the familiar. This is the story of a family that flees financial ruin by leaving the United States for