DISCOVERIES

Summer of My Amazing Luck

A Novel

Miriam Toews

Counterpoint: 304 pp., $14 paper

“AS a child I never once dreamed, ‘I will be a poor mother.’ I had fully intended to be a forest ranger,” says Lucy, the 18-year-old who narrates “Summer of My Amazing Luck.” Lucy has a son, Dill, and she doesn’t know who the father is. “If you eat a whole can of beans,” her friend Lish points out, “how do you know which one made you fart?” Lucy and Lish live with their children in the Have-A-Life -- they call it Half-A-Life -- housing project in Winnipeg, Canada. The people at Half-A-Life are nine-tenths funny and unforgettable and one-tenth painfully vulnerable. Not a drop of self-pity in sight, although many are caught in that vortex of life-chewing circumstance that often begins with a one-night stand. “Men and sex and money,” chants one character, “is that all we ever talk about?”

When Lish goes in search of the fire-eating busker who got her pregnant, Lucy goes with her. They fill a half-dead van (sporting an “I brake for hallucinations” bumper sticker) with blankets, broken strollers, diapers, sunscreen, Barbies and five kids and head for Colorado. “Part of me knew that he was more like a sweet memory,” thinks Lucy, “not a flesh and blood thing really.” This novel gets at the heart of what it means to risk everything for love -- of men, of women, of children, of friends.

*

Last Notes

And Other Stories

Tamas Dobozy

Arcade: 192 pp., $23

TAMAS DOBOZY -- like David Bezmozgis (“Natasha”), Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) and even Jeffrey Eugenides (at least in “The Virgin Suicides”) -- has mastered the art of deadpan, which is hard to pull off in print. You have to corral readers into little eddies of plot, trap them so they can’t tell whether they’re laughing or crying. There’s the husband in “Into the Ring”: He’s watching a boxing match in a TV movie. The victor is a smallish man, and this annoys his wife, who’s in her eighth month of pregnancy and finds it farcical that a small man could win a boxing match, outside of Hollywood. They take it to the floor.

There are no teleprompters here telling us loutish readers when to laugh or cry. No stop signs or warnings like “Falling Rocks” to keep us from running headlong down the mazes Dobozy creates. Who knows if we’ll need these facts later? For example, “Before I get into this business about my brother, Philip, I should probably say a word or two about the fez ... worn by Thelonius Monk in the CD booklet of the recording, ‘Monk Alone.’ ” These skilled writers of deadpan, so plentiful in the thirtysomething generation, are making fun of our pathological quest for information and the increasing ease with which we obtain it. We laugh at these wayward, distracted characters, ha-ha-ha! We’re laughing at ourselves.

*

Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers

Edited by Matt Kellogg and Jillian Quint

Random House: 304 pp., $13.95 paper

THESE are the winning essays from a national contest held by Random House editorial assistants Matt Kellogg and Jillian Quint. Most of the thousands of entries came in between 10 p.m. and midnight on deadline day, Nov. 24, 2005. “According to our colleagues,” Kellogg and Quint explain, “this meant we were a generation of procrastinators, too busy blogging about our recently diagnosed ADHD

These essays do have an urgency, an immediacy, even as the subject matter runs the gamut from sex to death. But the flip side of that immediacy is evanescence. The essays of the old masters (Montaigne to Phillip Lopate) hold their place on the page and the planet; these seem to slip away soon after you read them. It’s the utter lack of overarching context that can be disconcerting.