CONSTANCEBy Catherine CantrellRandom House: 214 pp., $22.95The...

CONSTANCE

By Catherine Cantrell

Random House: 214 pp., $22.95

The New Criticism. As any former English major can tell you, it’s all about the work itself. Novels and poems stand on their own, and the people who create them are irrelevant.

Morgan Clifford, whose father was an English professor, knows this all too well. She’s an editor at a white-shoe New York publishing house and the probing narrator of Catherine Cantrell’s mesmerizing first novel, a brilliant meditation on the connections and disconnections between life and art, and her career is at a crossroads: “The idealism of my own early years had been worn down

Bowled over by Constance’s intensity and unknowability, Morgan reawakens to the possibilities of literature. But her attempts to really understand Constance, to indulge the “infinite pleasure in being able to see the way a writer transforms a personal incident,” never get very far. The “mystery that we have unveiled,” she finds, “often tends to obscure much larger mysteries.”

For the biggest mystery is that Constance does have a life, one that ends up in the gossip pages and takes Morgan on a detour in which friendship and mentorship become hopelessly entangled. With its serene surface concealing an ocean of ambivalence, “Constance” is a small masterpiece. Like Morgan’s definition of the poet, it’s a quiet “volcano that ... erupts in a lava flow of language.”

*

THE RAINBOW SINGER

By Simon Kerr

Theia: 280 pp., $23.95

In Simon Kerr’s fun-loving novel about an adolescent Protestant Irish terrorist cut loose in Wisconsin, America is served up as a fantasy land that’s as ripe for worship as it is for ridicule.

Wil Carson, Kerr’s violence-prone teen antihero, proudly proclaims himself “an up-and-coming member of the Belvoir Brigade of the Third Battalion, the Ulster Freedom Fighters.” He has been brought to Packer Country to partake in a conciliation ritual in which pubescent Protestants and Catholics from Belfast are hosted by nice Milwaukee families with giggle-inducing surnames like Kuntz and Sticklegruber. It is into this feel-good American dream of togetherness that Wil who hates Catholics, or “Taigs,” as much as he loves heavy metal and “Happy Days” reruns, arrives like an infiltrating Old World sectarian virus. The results are both hilarious and murderous, as Wil’s partisan exuberance is ratcheted up by an unlikely alliance with a scary American jock known as Hulk.

Even if tuna and cucumber subs aren’t really standard Midwestern fare, even if the Van Halen tune is “Eruption,” not “Explosion,” and even if the Packers never won Super Bowls in the 1970s, Kerr, a Belfast native, gets the territory right enough to show us a disturbingly recognizable, if somewhat pat, America: a utopia of flapjacks and theme parks with a healthy appetite for handguns and revenge.

*

THE SOUND OF THE TREES

By Robert Gatewood

Henry Holt: 294 pp., $25

Trude Mason, the teenage cowpoke of Robert Gatewood’s hypnotic novel, cuts an odd figure. He’s a tyro Clint Eastwood, riding through New Mexico at his own pace, eventually turning up in a lawless, nameless town where morality has been turned inside out. The no-good mayor tells him upfront: “The desert is no place, just as the workings by which you wish to see the world turn are in fact no workings at all. They are that which is imagined. They are a dream, and no more.”

If the milieu of “The Sound of the Trees” (a suitably enigmatic title) is wall-to-wall Sergio Leone, its soul is pure Dorothea Lange, for Gatewood’s version of the Wild West isn’t set in the days of the OK Corral but in the Dust Bowl 1930s. Nevertheless, Trude still gets around on horseback, setting out, as the novel begins, with his mother to escape his abusive father.

The idea is to ride to Colorado, but this promised land slips out of Trude’s reach after his mother succumbs to a snakebite and he witnesses a dreadful crime involving a young black girl. Waylaid in this New Mexico town full of menacing eccentrics, he naively seeks justice and becomes an object of general suspicion.

Gatewood does his best to keep civilization at bay: So thorough is the mood of tumbleweed nihilism that we have to remind ourselves that Roosevelt is in office. If “The Sound of the Trees” is overly infatuated with its own sense of foreboding, it’s also a seductive reminder that, not so very long ago, the West was still wild.