DISCOVERIES

Camera Obscura

A Novel

Dennis Hicks

Marco Press: 268 pp., $15 paper

ONCE, Peter Winston’s father had all the answers. They camped and fished together in the High Sierra. Decades later, his 78-year-old father is afflicted with dementia. “The poorly imagined future had become the present. Peter had promised to pull the plug, but where was the plug?” Peter teaches history at Santa Monica High School. He has a 4-year-old daughter and a pretty good marriage. One day, standing inside the Camera Obscura by the Santa Monica Pier, he sees an old man run over by a bus and suspects that his death is no accident. Westside real estate, the Catholic Church, euthanasia -- slowly but surely, Peter works his way through a variety of ethical dilemmas. “Camera Obscura” is unusual for several reasons, not least of them the Westside setting, which rarely makes it into fiction -- unlike, say, the East Coast suburbs made famous by writers like John Updike and John Cheever. It’s also oddly quiet for a mystery-thriller, because much of the action takes place in Peter’s head. He’s a true everyman, transcending class, ethnicity -- even religion, despite his devotion to Catholicism. The issues he faces as a father, son and member of his community could appear in any life at any time. Confronting them with him reminds you of the great gift of good fiction -- a stage on which we can play out the profound decisions of our lives.

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Hack

How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab

Melissa Plaut

Villard: 256 pp., $13.95 paper

OUT of the thousands of licensed cab drivers in New York City, only about 200 are women, Melissa Plaut tells us. Her first day on the job, a man made his hand into the shape of a gun, stuck it in the passenger-side window, said, “Gimme all your money,” then walked off laughing. “The plan when I got into this was to live life without regrets,” she writes. “To not settle for anything. To not get stuck behind a desk with a job I hated just because it paid well.” After college, Plaut tried a number of jobs: Never sell out, never settle and never work in advertising were her only goals, but she found herself doing all three.

On her 29th birthday, Plaut, who grew up in a suburb of New York, got her license to drive a cab. Part of the fascination of “Hack” lies in the opportunity to learn how one survives in such a high-stress job. The dark alleys, the endless supply of characters, the mysterious brotherhood of city cabdrivers make “Hack” a true page-turner. Normally calm, dignified and in control, Plaut is thrown one day by the sight of a bloody traffic fatality: “In some jobs, people see death all the time. But my job was to drive, to navigate the city, to sit safely sheltered in a yellow Ford Crown Victoria, a partition separating me from the passengers, a windshield separating me from the world.” Rarely do we get a chance to see this particular working world. Grab it.

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The Unheard

A Memoir of Deafness and Africa

Josh Swiller

Henry Holt: 270 pp., $14 paper

JOSH SWILLER, a young man tired of living on the margins because of his deafness (even with the help of hearing aids), joined the Peace Corps and went to Zambia for two years. As a white man, he was given an authority he had never had back in the States. Working in a health clinic, he experienced the full force of Africa’s violence, disease and poverty.

Several ingredients are crucial in a memoir like this: humor, the ability to see enough details to make the scene come alive and a dispassionate compassion. Swiller has them all. A particularly violent incident brings a life-changing revelation. With a new sense of self, Swiller goes home, only to suffer the reaction to American culture so many travelers experience: “The meat on my plate spilled off the edges. Next to it were piled mixed vegetables and mashed potatoes scooped hollow and filled with brown gravy. A carrot floated in the gravy like a boat on a lake. I nudged it in little circles. Conversations flew around the table like punctured balloons, faster than I had remembered, way too fast for my ears to follow.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com