Discoveries

The Woman Who Knew Gandhi, A Novel

Keith Heller

Mariner Books: 208 pp., $12 paper

It can be jarring to find yourself in the mind of a character in a novel, especially one with a secret life. Martha Houghton is a 73-year-old woman who has led such a life for so many decades that she has trouble sorting fiction from reality. As a girl of 16, she began a relationship with Mohandas K. Gandhi through letters and rare visits, until his assassination in 1948. When the novel opens, he has just been killed and Martha receives a letter from his son in Bombay, threatening to expose her letters to the public. Martha is forced to reveal the relationship to her husband and children and a few friends in Hedge End, England, where she has lived a simple village life for many years. When the story gets out, her husband leaves, the paparazzi camp outside her door and she decides to travel to Bombay -- to get away, to come to terms with her past and to meet Gandhi’s son.

“A woman’s heart,” says an elderly woman on the same ship to India, “has more chambers in it than the four the doctors would have us believe. A man’s also, I don’t doubt. I shouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. Love can take so many forms that even I haven’t neared the end of counting them, and life has its own sublime way of working these things out.”

What drives this tale is the difference between the larger-than-life spiritual leader and the quiet daily one of the woman in Hedge End. Keith Heller leads us slowly through her revelations as she begins to reconcile her two lives. Even so, the effect is not unlike the feeling a reader has of getting lost between life and story, fiction and reality.

*

Little Edens: Stories

Barbara Klein Moss

W.W. Norton: 294 pp., $23.95

This author is not so gentle. Barbara Klein Moss throws the reader in a room with her characters and slams the door shut. There is the Persian rug weaver who has come to live with his son and beautiful daughter-in-law, the 30-year-old woman moving from her parents’ house for the first time, the 40-year-old English woman whose passions are trapped in her music. Are these people you want to spend intimate time with? Consider the weaver: “First, strands of light teased until they stretched the length of the wall, the thread skeleton flickering like a home movie, reminding him of how humbly he began.” For Moss’ characters, the answer is yes.

Southern California is a reliably funny (sometimes soothing, sometimes blinding) background to these stories: “One couldn’t really be depressed here. Frustrated, perhaps. Thwarted, yes. But liquid gold was always pouring from the sky ... inducing giddiness.” The problem is not in the climate or even the characters but in how much closer we become to those we read about than we are to the people we know.

*

Walk Like a Natural Man: A Novel

M. Dion Thompson

Blackwords Press: 372 pp., $24.95

There is another way to sweet-talk a reader into the mind of a character: Write, even in the third person, in that character’s voice. Skip Reynolds is a naive but determined young black man who leaves behind his sharecropper’s life picking cotton in Texas and gets on the Southern Pacific to become a star in Hollywood. Capra films, Count Basie blues, satin dresses -- it’s the 1930s in Los Angeles and everything is possible.

But he is hit by one crisis after another: a train wreck, an encounter with police and near eviction when his $35 runs out. When he learns he has sent $5 to an acting school in Los Angeles that doesn’t exist, we get that old sinking feeling. At first Reynolds’ language is off-putting: “Onliest thing he got too much of is hard times,” and “Jesus don’t Jim Crow nobody.”

Yet his belief in himself is what real histories are made of, naive as that may seem. A reader begins to believe as well. Inhabiting the heart and mind of Reynolds for 372 pages is an antidote to cynicism.