DISCOVERIES

Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions, by Jenny Diski, Picador USA: 320 pp., $24

Writer Dan Duane calls books like “Stranger on a Train,” “lemonade books, books about what I did while I was trying to write a book.”

Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage,” about his procrastinations while intending to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, is a model of this genre.

Jenny Diski, who writes mainly fiction, but every so often about travel, is the same messed-up Brit chick, God love ‘er, whether she’s writing about Antarctica or traveling around the circumference of America via Amtrak. She spends almost as much time telling us about the book she’s not going to write as she does in the smoking car, which is where she meets the characters she writes about. The ratio of time spent bemoaning American openness is about equal to the time spent telling us her psychiatric history, which, because we are Americans, she knows we will listen to with empathy and understanding.

“Stranger on a Train” is not only a fun book (how un-British), it is, along with the best of “the lemonade books,” an important book. It challenges the authoritarian voice of the author, which can, in literature, get way too top-heavy. What seem often to be books by hugely neurotic thinkers are often books that break down barriers between writers and readers that have built up like tartar between literary fashions and threaten to bring down the whole smile, irony and all.

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Confessions of a Pagan Nun, by Kate Horsley, Shambhala: 208 pp., $10.95 paper

To the great horror of the book burners, our children have been having all the fun in the last few years, reading about pre-Christian magic. It’s not the first time pagans have threatened the status quo, but each new resurrection of a pagan god or goddess is a cause for feasting.

Kate Horsley’s novel presents itself as the account of the nun Gwynneve’s sixth century pagan childhood, imagined from a Gaelic heretical document. In the novel, Gwynneve remembers her childhood: her mother, a healer and herb gatherer, and her apprenticeship with a Druid, when she learned how to write and translate from several languages, a skill that proved useful in the convent she would be expelled from.

Many of her ruminations concern the inability of paganism and Christianity to blend peacefully. She credits Christianity with advances in education and health, but criticizes its estrangement of women and its crusade to separate people from the land, making the Earth “a place of degradation and temptation,” and offering heaven in its stead. “Is it not possible,” she wonders, “that instead of original sin, there is original grace?”

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The Miracle, by John L’Heureux, Atlantic Monthly: 240 pp., $24

Father LeBlanc is a priest in South Boston. He’s what most readers would call a good priest, empathetic, inspirational, committed. But the church is repeatedly disappointed in him: his views on Vietnam, delivered from the pulpit, his views on the merits of “papal infallibility.” He’s a bit of a loose cannon.

Loose cannons are John L’Heureux’s specialty. His loose cannon in “Having Everything” was a highly respected academic who found himself wandering into people’s houses, uninvited, at odd hours. He writes quietly, almost tenderly, like Charles Baxter, about faith and about regular people.

L’Heureux also has a gift for making highly accessible characters, characters. When they make mistakes, no matter how grave, it is easy to understand. “You don’t have to hate yourself,” Father LeBlanc realizes after a transgression that threatens his calling. “You can just live.”

He comes up against a brick wall of hubris, realizing that he has become a priest for all the wrong reasons. L’Heureux brings the priest through his crisis of faith with the same tenderness that makes all his books such a pleasure to read.