DISCOVERIES

SUMMERHOUSE, LATER

Stories

By Judith Hermann

Translated from the German

by Margot Bettauer Dembo

Ecco: 224 pp., $22.95

Linked stories can be a powerful form. Done well, they are filled with echoes: gestures that appear story to story, smells and words, not to mention names and connections between the characters. They can reflect the tendrils of memory that grow into the present, facts and items of earlier moments that reappear throughout a lifetime. They have, by their very haunting nature, like the stories in Judith Hermann’s eerie collection, a sense of existing underwater, which sometimes comes up to the surface, where the light is too bright and everything is practical.

“Does winter sometimes remind you of something, you don’t know what?” the narrator asks in the end of one story. This is a typical Hermann line. As if that weren’t mysterious enough, the stories in “Summerhouse, Later” are set in Germany, many in Berlin where the contemporary characters are faded members of the aristocracy left to their tea and toast in heavily draped apartments, cabdrivers, artists and beautiful women from Bali. Hermann can write a club scene in which the narrator becomes drunker and drunker with more conviction and precision than just about anyone I’ve ever read. She has a keen grasp (if such a thing is possible) of the unreal.

*

A CUP OF LIGHT

By Nicole Mones

Delacorte Press: 296 pp., $24.95

Back on the surface again, “A Cup of Light” is a delightful novel written in a far more traditional style than Hermann’s. Nicole Mones uses the style I always associate with the novels of Tom Wolfe, particularly “Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which characters’ lives are told in threads that gradually become entwined as the story develops. It begins with Gao Yideng, an art collector and entrepreneur in Beijing remembering his childhood, a time of famine and poverty. He has a hunger that cannot be filled. For what? He doesn’t know. Enter Lia Frank, a specialist in Chinese porcelain who is called to Beijing to study a gold mine of pots from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. Frank has a fascinating talent for memory, a palace she creates in her mind with many rooms, each of which holds data about a particular pot. In Beijing, she has the task of determining which of the pots are real and which are fake before the collection is sold to a wealthy Chinese American living in Seattle. Ancient art, as novelist Robertson Davies knew and other fiction writers know, makes a fine heart for a novel. Arteries wind from its creation, sending each of the characters on his or her own separate quest, usually a journey back into their own pasts.

The interweaving of characters’ lives, one chapter Gao, one chapter Frank, one chapter wealthy collector, for example, is good for a popular novel, but prevents any serious depth or insight into the characters’ lives. In the end, it has more the feel of a cocktail party than a story; a buffet as opposed to a sit-down dinner.

*

HOW NANCY JACKSON MARRIED KATE WILSON

And Other Tales of Rebellious Girls & Daring Young Women

By Mark Twain

Edited by John Cooley

Bison Books / University of Nevada

Press: 254 pp., $21.95

Samuel Clemens lived in a house of women. He had three daughters. By 1906, the youngest of these had left the roost, and Clemens began seeking out the company of young schoolgirls (once they turned 16, he felt uncomfortable about the friendships). They were his “Angel-Fish,” and he called his home the “Aquarium Club.” Around this time, he began writing more and more about adventurous daring women, as well as satires on sentimental romance. Characters like Lucretia Borgia Smith, Hellfire Hotchkiss and Wrapping Alice were vehicles for his fascination with role-playing in relationships, cross-dressing and vigilante women. The hard-driving, horse-riding, gun-toting cowgirls are fun, but the stories in which he makes fun of sappy romance are the side-splitters.

“Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man” is a story written in the form of a plaintive letter from a young woman engaged to a man who, during the course of their engagement, got the small pox, lost limbs and an eye to various accidents and was scalped by an Indian (he lives, scalpless). Aurelia wonders if it would be wrong to break off the engagement. “Little Bessie” is written in a series of questions from an extremely precocious 3-year-old. “St. Joan of Arc” reveals Twain’s true respect for women and in many ways his visionary insight into a future in which women get out in the world and take control of their own destinies.