DISCOVERIES

THE STORIES OF BREECE D’J PANCAKE

By Breece D’J Pancake

Back Bay Books:

186 pp., $13.95

Some writing comes from the ego, some from the id. Breece Pancake is one of those writers who burst on the world with great promise, publishing his story “Trilobites” in The Atlantic in 1977, but left in great sorrow, shooting himself. His brief oeuvre is all id: rough and random and sometimes irrational. It is often hard to tell whom the main character in these stories is talking to, his dogs or his woman (both are called “her” or “she”).

One story begins from the point of view of a possum, scurrying to get her babies across the road. The characters are “crackers,” low-class whites in West Virginia. Some of their values--tolerant of sex with minors, or jokes about sex with minors, or racism--are so distasteful. It’s not a question of being PC or not PC; something just smells bad. Women are always leaving in these stories; in fact, there’s nothing close to love as we know it. There’s regret and guilt and silence and shyness but no love. Life is hard when nothing is put into words, and even the landscape reflects that emptiness. “The passing of an autumn night left no mark on the patchwork blacktop.”

In his afterword, Andre Dubus III speculates that Pancake was ashamed of his people, and it’s true: He paints with the colors of shame. Nothing is spoken; everything is ominous: “On a knoll in the ridge, run there by the dogs, the bobcat watched, waiting for the man to leave.” We may be mean, but there’s something even meaner out there.

*

I.

By Stephen Dixon

McSweeney’s Books: 338 pp., $18

The novel “I.” is Stephen Dixon’s Woody Allen moment. It is the most detailed, hand-wringing, obsessive rant of a novel written by an author so tied up in knots and so indecisive that he must be poking fun at the whole exercise of writing. In fact, much of “I.” reads like an exercise. In one chapter, the author tries to imagine the saddest story he possibly can and lays out its outline for the reader. In another, the author gets twisted around like a dog on a leash when he tries to refer to his main character, I., in the third person.

The first five pages of the novel, which is about a man who raises two daughters and cares for his wife who is confined to a wheelchair, are almost completely anonymous and impersonal. While the pace of “I.” and the playfulness with points of view are sometimes disorienting, some moments are particularly affecting, such as the 20 pages in which a character tries to get from one room to another. It’s a moment drawn from our lives, cluttered--as they sometimes are--with mental, emotional and physical distractions. Dixon rarely lets his characters miss a chance to stumble, even if it’s just on the way to the medicine cabinet.

*

TWELVE

By Nick McDonell

Grove Press: 246 pp., $23

White Mike is just out of high school and postponing his first year of college (his parents want him to go to Dartmouth). But Mike is making too much money selling drugs to want to leave. He lives on the Upper East Side like most of his friends. Their parents are hardly ever around, too busy jet-setting. His friend Hunter lives with his sad, drunken father. Hunter can hardly bear to be around Dad.

Mike misses his mother, who left him and then died. At his mother’s funeral, we get a brief look into Mike’s soul: “You will not be remembered if you die now,” he thinks. “But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold onto because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God.”

But because most of the kids are so busy being tough, it’s hard, as in real life, to tell what they feel. Mike doesn’t do drugs himself but seems to feel no remorse and no fear, despite the murders and drive-bys in neighborhoods less fragrant than the ones he and his friends call home. He’s had a fixation with Samurai for years and loves to read Nietzsche; violent videos are almost beside the point. “Twelve” builds, thinly, without layering, to a party that is bad from beginning to end. A 16-year-old has sex with a pusher to get the drug Twelve for the party. Mike happens on them, and the pusher starts shooting. Many children die.

Nick McDonell’s “Twelve” has a mentorless feel, like something that percolated from his experiences and came out fresh, with little editing. It is a fragile voice, the voice of an author who will forever be digging out of a hole, from which he hopes to see and describe the sky.