Discoveries

Touch Wood: Short Stories, Joe Ashby Porter, Turtle Point Press: 192 pp., $15.95

Joe Ashby Porter’s reckless, feckless writing weaves itself around characters that often seem to hop out of fairy tales: a milliner; a Tlingit fisherman named Johnny John Hawk; a hair wrapper; various Frenchmen. It is fiction that consistently pokes fun at logic using bizarre sentence structure; oversized language more appropriate for members of the Lollipop Guild: words like “yore,” “thenceforth,” and “wont” swim in the same soup as “gustatory,” “fetching,” and “tumble-fluffing.” “Misty silvers wiggle into the happy storm drains.” Mind-altering but not mind-blowing. Depressing but not desperate, like the French father who tells his 30-year-old stay-at-home son that his mother died while giving birth to him (the son) in order to keep him from getting married and depriving the old man of free labor. This is the stuff of childhood nightmares: evil elves and moon-faced fishermen.

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The Conscience of a Liberal Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda, Paul Wellstone, University of Minnesota Press:

216 pp., $17.95 paper

“The worst thing that could happen,” the late Paul Wellstone writes in “The Conscience of a Liberal,” a memoir that might serve as well as his epitaph, “would be to lose your dignity, to vote against your convictions, and lose the next election anyway.” During his years in the Senate, Wellstone fought for health care and welfare reform and against standardized testing in public schools and the criminalization of mental illness. Wellstone wrote as honestly as he lived: “I miss my dad so much,” he writes after describing his father’s death. He admits to feeling guilty over his parents working-class roots, and he wishes that his older brother, a man who has suffered from a series of what he calls “nervous breakdowns,” could enjoy a full and happy life. In his life and in his words, the senator from Minnesota, a man many called “embarrassingly liberal,” never lost his dignity.

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Black Novel With Argentines, Luisa Valenzuela, Translated from the Spanish, by Toby Talbot, Latin American Literary Review Press: 220 pp., $17.95

Welcome to Dostoevsky-ville, land of guilt and exile. Land of no escape from oneself. Land of the fiction of fear. Writers experienced in the culture of tyranny (and there are many kinds, but in Luisa Valenzuela’s case, it is the kind of tyranny that tears bodies apart and leaves them by the side of the road) convey fear better than any crime writer looking to be optioned. Augustin Palant, our unlikely hero, is a writer who has recently left his home in Buenos Aires with the understanding that any day he would be murdered (like so many others during an unspecified repressive regime) if he stayed. At a New York literary event he meets another writer, Roberta, who is also exiled from Argentina. Augustin is blocked, in spite of a generous grant. “Write with your body,” she advises him. He buys a gun to protect himself from the dangerous New York streets. Wandering around the city one night, he is given a ticket to an underground play. He follows an actress home and shoots her in the head. Why? He doesn’t know. Until Roberta takes him home for soup and an herbal bath. It takes months for him to fully drag her into his despair. Roberta’s closest friend is a dominatrix, so the novel is peppered with forays into that world of cruelty for play, and also with memories of Argentina, where the torture was performed with intent to kill.

Artaud, Bataille, Cortazar: This is the tradition of art and artifice of which Valenzuela is a vivid student. Sex -- perverse, cathartic, flailing, more about role-playing and power than love -- mirrors the political, moral and physical decay of Buenos Aires and New York. There isn’t a chance that either character will crawl from the wreckage of this novel cleansed and whole. No more than Raskolnikov. Hope for the future? Pick a different novel.