DISCOVERIES

The Last Song

of Dusk

A Novel

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Arcade: 298 pp., $23.95

IN “The Last Song of Dust,” Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi has created a world of duranta flowers, frangipani, acacia, peacocks, banyan trees, a million shades of red, scented with jasmine attar and cinnamon and sounding like silver bangles on a slim wrist. Anuradha, so beautiful at 21, leaves her Udaipur home to marry a Bombay doctor.

Alas, the doctor has an evil stepmother, Divi-bai, who lives with them. Joan Collins has nothing on Divi-bai, who even has a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet. Divi-bai threw her twin sister to the crocodiles when they were young, claiming that her sister nicked her crayons. This gives you an idea of the flaming hell our young beauty (who sings like a dream) has been thrown into. “The Last Song of Dusk” is a gorgeous novel, a novel of Rajasthan, written with a youthful, twinkling eye.

*

Moira Orfei

in Aigues-Mortes

A Novel

Wayne Koestenbaum

Soft Skull Press: 214 pp., $13.95 paper

Autumn is an excellent time to indulge obsessions. The bestsellers have had their summer flings and the long winter stretches out ahead. “Don’t get your hopes up,” warns Wayne Koestenbaum, whose princely obsessions have resulted in his books on Andy Warhol, Jackie O, cleavage, male literary collaboration and the relationship between opera and homosexuality. “The object in your hands is not a novel. Call it a still life: sentences without development, incident, or kindness. I wish I could speak with greater forbearance about the people I know, and about my own fate. Instead, I atomize noxious events and unwanted persons, turn them into particles.” This is the voice of pianist Theo Mangrove, protagonist of Koestenbaum’s first novel, “Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes.”

Theo, son of famous pianist Alma Mangrove of Buenos Aires and East Kill, N.Y., prepares for his comeback concert in a dingy little French town, Aigues-Mortes (Dead Water). His last performance ended abruptly with his nervous breakdown on stage, a real career-buster. But Theo dreams of a spectacular collaboration with the object of his obsession: Moira Orfei, circus star extraordinaire. Theo lives with his mother, sister and wife, which can be exhausting for a homosexual of his temperament. He has tested positive for HIV but doesn’t let it affect his plans for the future, which grow increasingly dependent on Moira.

Theo worries each incident, each love affair, with such intensity that he atomizes the world around him into particles. His laser-like intensity sharpens every detail: “Her shiny circus slacks were fathomless turquoise, like the bottom of a shallow East Kill stream where I used to wade, afraid of rocks and yet drawn to them, curious about drowning.”

*

Revenge

A Novel

Mary Morris

St. Martin’s: 230 pp., $21.95

Mary MORRIS tackles obsession in an entirely different way. Like Koestenbaum, Morris atomizes the particulars in her universe of characters. But hers is not the wild, lavish laser-vision; it is the weary, dogged, meticulous, manipulative vision common also in novels by Joyce Carol Oates. Down to the decaf skim latte, we know what Morris’ characters want and need.

In “Revenge,” Andrea Geller is a well-known painter, a young guest lecturer at a tony East Coast college. Her father has died recently under mysterious circumstances and she frets over the facts around his death while alone in her apartment and out loud with her neighbor, famous novelist Loretta Partlow, a sort of “guidance counselor from the 1950s.” This is the kind of book that can be annoying, like a TV series that leaves you hanging at the end of each episode. You long for resolution or death, if only to break the tedium of Andrea’s self-indulgence. Morris has got something going on; I just wish she’d dredge the lake a little faster.