HERBy Laura ZigmanAlfred A. Knopf: 210 pp.,...

HER

By Laura Zigman

Alfred A. Knopf: 210 pp., $22

Ever had the pleasure of withstanding the constant intrusions of an ex-girlfriend in your new relationship? The kind who does whatever she can to stay in his life? She is what “Her” is about. Elise meets Donald, traveling by plane on the Northeast corridor from New York to Washington. Snappy young professionals, they fall in love, become engaged, move to Washington, D.C., and plan a conspicuously consumptive wedding. All is joyous until Adrienne, Donald’s old girlfriend, calls to announce that she is moving to Washington. Adrienne is everything Elise is not: tall, buxom, flashy, flirtatious, rich and well-connected. “Adrienne was my Chinese water torture,” Elise confesses. “Drop by drop by drop; phone call by phone call by phone call.” Elise the happy wife-to-be becomes Elise the message-checking, hang-up calling, suspicious woman, the shrew everyone is so busy hating that they let the guy off the hook entirely. As for Adrienne, she is a piece of manipulative work, calling Donald regularly to ask for his help and advice, insinuating herself into the wedding plans and sharing deep intense memories with a man she left seven years earlier. The hazards of male-female relations are Laura Zigman’s territory, particularly the ones that are too trite for most print media other than Cosmopolitan. But ask yourself: Why are they trite? Answer: Because they happen so often. Zigman is funny but less so than in her previous novel, “Animal Husbandry,” which was altogether more subtle and inventive.

*

THE HORNED MAN

By James Lasdun

W.W. Norton: 208 pp., $24.95

Fascinating how the eerie echoes of past authors reverberate through generations of literature. Or maybe it’s true that there is only a finite number of bones that literature is suited to chew on, human dilemmas that the best and brightest set their minds to. Can we ever really understand one another? How can we make love stay? How do we know who we really are? In James Lasdun’s “The Horned Man,” it takes about five pages to smell Kafka in the air.

Lawrence Miller is a professor of gender studies at a liberal arts college in New Jersey. In this capacity, he serves on the sexual harassment committee. New on the job, he wanders around his office collecting clues of past inhabitants: a coat belonging to a professor who died, a book and a manuscript. He’s haunted by the ghost of a larger than life professor who indulged in relationships with his students and fled to Eastern Europe. His world begins to unravel when a bookmark seems mysteriously to have changed its place in a book he is reading. Next, the phone bill reveals calls from his office that he has not made. Then he thinks he sees his therapist on the street when she has actually been in her office. Little transgressions, slips in reality, begin to unravel Miller’s assiduously organized life. Suddenly Lasdun turns up the volume: Murders and sexual assaults swirl around Miller, who believes that he is being framed for these crimes. Escalating paranoia increases his disorientation and the reader’s. He becomes judge and judged, in pursuit of demons in a life and an environment that is covered by a cloud of unknowing.

*

AMERICAN FALLS

By Barry Gifford

Seven Stories: 252 pp., $24.95

The Hemingway generation is almost gone, so it’s rare to see a novel or collection of stories in which an author makes almost no attempt to explain a character’s actions. Barry Gifford is this type of writer. His characters are more like character actors, and the result is a kind of sentimental poignancy, a collection of deeply meaningful moments (usually involving flights into the sunset) that have almost no clout and no relevance to anyone’s life except the actors’. For example, “Danny sat in the idling automobile, trembling. It was time to find Yolanda.” Which is a shame, because Gifford’s reach across class and place and age and gender is wide. He strays far from home and is not afraid to use his imagination. But his characters are disconnected, even from their stage sets. A Japanese man running a motel in Idaho warns a black man staying there that the police are after him. A man in Italy pays a ransom for his car and ends the evening in the home of the robbers, meeting their families. A bolt of lightning prompts a man to confront his self-hating girlfriend. A man in a bar is approached by a woman who tells him the story of her life over a martini and then leaves. Each is like a captivating play in which the cast simply walks offstage before the third act, and the audience sits alone, waiting in the dark theater.