Discoveries

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And She Was

A Novel

Cindy Dyson

William Morrow: 304 pp., $24.95

CINDY DYSON, part cocktail waitress, part Arctic explorer, grew up in Alaska. Her rough, working-class voice is perfect for a novel set in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, a “reckless, shameless place” populated by fishermen and Aleuts. The narrator, Brandy (named by her boozy parents), has traveled 800 miles across the Bering Sea to be with her fisherman boyfriend. Within a day, she has a job waitressing at a notorious bar, the Elbow Room; a place to live (without electricity, phone or running water); and a motorcycle that must be begged telepathically before it will start. Brandy attributes many of her problems to the fact that she’s extremely blond, but she does a lot of bad-girl talking, coke-snorting and drinking to go with the hair. Woven with her story is the history of the Aleuts, particularly the women, back to the mid-1700s, when Russian raiders killed 90% of the people. During famines, the women broke taboos against hunting by females, for which they were ostracized and blamed for epidemics that killed many of the villagers not slain by Russians. Brandy begins as not much more than a pretty girl and ends up acquiring a substantial character, empowered, in part, by the ghosts of Aleut women.

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A Family Daughter

A Novel

Maile Meloy

Scribner: 336 pp., $24

IN some novels, characters and events seem extraordinary, amplified. In others, like “A Family Daughter,” the novel’s world and its characters seem familiar. These things could happen to you. People you know say things that Maile Meloy’s characters say. The simplest adjectives (the “slim young waiter,” the “small pretty room”) suffice; in splashier novels, pyrotechnics are called on to plant the characters in the reader’s mind. It helps that “A Family Daughter” is set on that dear, familiar stretch of the California coast between Hermosa Beach and Mendocino. And it helps that the Santerre family, at least the three generations we get to know, includes so many appealing personalities, with all the dreams, hopes and foibles of people we have loved at one time or another. Relationships and secrets fuel the plot; it’s the kind of novel that makes a reader mutter ridiculous things out loud, such as, “Not her, you idiot, you’re supposed to be with him!”

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Tremble + Ennui

A Novel

Edgar Nicaud

CoatPocket Press: 192 pp., $8.95 paper

THIS odd little novel, set in New Orleans, written before Hurricane Katrina and published, unchanged, after, features the post-millennium Bonnie and Clyde -- Tremble, a big-breasted, Chanel-suited floozy, and her dapper, martini-mixing sidekick, Ennui. Together, they traipse, they pilfer, they eat in fine restaurants and they never pay the bill. They scheme, they put off the landlord, they frolic in that “sad old city of tumble-down shacks and termite-eaten mansions,” of “rotting plantation houses sinking into the mud.” Nicaud builds Tremble and Ennui from scratch and leaves them on the banks of the river wondering whether it’s time to leave town.

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Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays

Thomas C. Schelling

Harvard University Press: 360 pp., $39.95

THOMAS SCHELLING, 2005 Nobel laureate in economics, is interested in the strategies -- rational, irrational, mean, kind -- that people use to constrain their behavior. In these essays, he looks at addiction, temptation and resolve, as well as the use of threats, promises and bluffing. What’s fascinating is that he applies his analysis of these strategies not only to individual behavior but also to critical issues like race relations, abortion and the behavior of nations -- for example, international agreements to reduce greenhouse gases. Schelling is that rarest of creatures, an economist who writes clearly, takes on practical questions and thinks them through alongside his reader. He is delightful to read.