CRUSTACEANSBy Andrew CowanPicador: 240 pp., $22Midwinter, and...

CRUSTACEANS

By Andrew Cowan

Picador: 240 pp., $22

Midwinter, and the narrator of this novel, Paul, 30-something, is driving to a seaside village somewhere in Britain. Why? Don’t know. He thinks aloud as if he were speaking to someone, but to whom? We sense another presence in the car. We think it is a child and, after 20 pages or so, we are pretty certain the child has died. But we don’t ask. We are polite. Get on with it, man! Who died? Was it your fault? Paul won’t say. He thinks about his mother, who died when she was 25 and he was 10. Then the “you” he talks to gets more specific. The “you” is a little boy, named Euan, who died when he was nearly 6. Ominous pronoun, you. So unspecific and yet so very intimate and specific to the narrator. When we die, do we become pronouns in literature’s graveyard?

And so Andrew Cowan’s “Crustaceans” hurtles toward death, gathering facts as it plows through the narrator’s memories of his mother and of his lover, Euan’s mother, Ruth, and of his mighty father, a sculptor. This death becomes a juggernaut in our imaginations: gathering momentum, making us read further because we want to know how and why. In fiction, death is often a denouement on the page, like Virginia Woolf’s famous parentheses around Mrs. Ramsey’s death: a mere mention or phrase. Not in this novel, which works exactly backward from real life, unzipping itself to Euan’s death. In the end, it is too intimate a novel. Life after Euan’s death is more relevant to us, and there is none of that here. We will not know Paul and Ruth as they hobble through life after the death of their son. We did not know Euan. He was Paul’s “you.”

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HE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

By Sue Monk Kidd

Viking: 302 pp., $24.95

“The Secret Life of Bees” begins with a death and proceeds down the road through the lives of the people left behind. “It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening,” thinks the brave young girl at the heart of this novel, whose mother died when she was 4, leaving her with the meanest cuss of a father in South Carolina. So mean that he tells his 4-year-old daughter, who had been caught in the middle of a shoving match with a gun between the two parents, that she was the one who pushed the gun and set it off, killing her own mother. This is only a convenient story for the police and only the tip of the iceberg of T. Ray’s meanness. Sue Monk Kidd’s novel is a study of meanness, a still life in which each fruit represents a different variety: bullies, racists, police, drunks, crazy people, petty people and tattletales. Lily Melissa Owens runs through this story holding her mother’s pure love. She frees her baby-sitter, a black maid who has been abused by several white men and put in prison for it, and the two of them follow Lily’s instincts to safety. They tend bees in a house in another town where Lily’s mother once found sanctuary, and that’s all I can say about it. “The Secret Life” is one of those novels that leaves a reader more confident: Heck, if this kid could do it, so can I.

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CITY WILDS

Essays and Stories About Urban Nature

Edited by Terrell F. Dixon

Georgia University Press:

312 pp., $19.95 paper

Phrases such as “relationship to place” leave us all cold, as if we’re standing on an already defeated planet remembering what the wind smelled like. Some of these essays wander down that dead end, but most don’t. The best describe something new you might not have noticed.

Take Chet Raymo’s essay about silence: “It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky.... The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars.” Or William Goyen’s essay describing the people of New York’s Third Avenue as a kind of gypsy tribe that still had the spirit of the El train going through them: “These Third Avenue people had the same vagabond, noisy air and quality that the ramshackle train and platform symbolized. The El had created a genus of humanity, almost as the plow had shaped his own.” That is sterling writing. And so is David Wong Louie’s story “Bottles Beaujolais,” set in New York among people who think they can control nature, with its fantastic riff on wines: “‘To me you are a burgundy,’ I said. Each syllable echoed in my ears long after it had left my lips.... ‘There’s nothing remotely sauterne about you. You’re not even blond.’” All the senses are alive in the best of these essays and stories. The writing proves the old theory that our finest metaphors come from nature, no matter where we find it.