DISCOVERIES

The Land

of Women

Regina McBride

Touchstone Books: 256 pp.,

$13 paper

Jane can’t help herself. She’s a full-blooded Irish girl with a powerful hunger -- and a connoisseur’s appreciation -- for men. But Ronan is the one she falls for, and when she has his baby, Fiona, he becomes little more than a visitor in their home. As Fiona grows up, she helps her mother make spells and fetishes that will bring Ronan back. She watches her mother become the joke of the village. The two move next door to an orphanage. They make bridal gowns for local girls. Fiona falls in love with a handsome young farmer, a kind of Celtic satyr, and “The Land of Women” is diverted by some of the earthiest fertility rituals you’d ever see on a pagan Sunday. But when the young farmer goes after her mother as well, Fiona escapes to America, to Santa Fe, N.M., where Ronan now lives.

It’s a youthful, wistful, helpless and lusty novel, reminding us of all those things we depend upon Irish writers to remind us of: where we came from, how closely the body is tied to the earth and what the uses of passion might be.

*

The True Account

A Novel of the Lewis and Clark

and Kinneson Expeditions

Howard Frank Mosher

Houghton Mifflin: 352 pp., $24

Picaresque is too tame a word for this imagined romp through the somber history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Pvt. True Teague Kinneson, soldier, adventurer, the reincarnation of Don Quixote, having been wounded in the head defending Ethan Allen at the Battle of Ft. Ticonderoga, sets out in the spring of 1804 from his home in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to beat the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He is accompanied by his nephew, Ti (named after Ticonderoga), who has been given official responsibility for his uncle by his hard-working farmer parents.

First stop: Monticello, where a bemused President Jefferson gives the pair horses for their journey. They continue from Monticello to St. Louis, along the Missouri River, through Blackfoot and Teton Sioux country, along the Columbia River through Shoshone territory and finally to the Pacific, always one step ahead of Lewis and Clark. They play baseball with the Nez Perce, save Lewis and Clark from an army of Spaniards and Anasazi, meet Daniel Boone and his provocative daughter, Flame, and carry Uncle True’s supply of hemp tobacco across the country.

Uncle True sends letters back to the president, informing him of “the rugged beauties of the Pacific coast -- all exceed anything to be found in our tame, unimaging East,” but also imploring the president to behave well to the Indians: “I beg you to honor their political divisions, their histories, their persons and their dignity.” It’s a great adventure, told with the dry subversive humor of a true Vermonter.

*

Speaking of Beauty

Denis Donoghue

Yale University Press: 200 pp.,

$24.95

“Beauty is ‘back,’ ” writes Denis Donoghue, and he may well be right. Rescued from its capture by political ideology, it is now permissible as a subject in cultural studies, which are now, he sighs almost audibly, “less politicized.” “My theme,” he writes, “is the language of beauty: not beauty as such or a definition of the beautiful, but beauty in its social manifestations, its discursive presence.” He includes beauty in a short list of values: “life, love, truth, virtue, justice, and beauty. To these might be added: power, belief, communication, and money.”

What good is beauty? Why should it make the list? Because it reminds us of what is true. Because beauty inspires selflessness and independence. “Because it encourages a contemplative, patient, appreciative attitude.” These and other reasons and examples presented by Donaghue are strangely reassuring. As if the thought of beauty itself could still the mind and place us back on the right track, whatever and wherever that may be.