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The Hunter
By Julia Leigh
Four Walls Eight Windows, 176 pages

On the basis of this slim and astringent first novel, Australian Julia Leigh, 30, is being hailed as the antipodal Annie Proulx. It’s easy to see why: Leigh writes the same kind of wintry, even brittle sentences as Proulx; she vivifies her cool, rugged landscapes with tart descriptions of natural arcana; and she gives scant attention to the more tender elements of her characters’ serrated lives, choosing instead to fling them into the pits she creates and then chart, with a kind of forensic detachment, their efforts to claw their way out.

Leigh’s protagonist, in fact, doesn’t even merit the gentle favor of a name. “M,” as Leigh calls him, is a professional hunter who’s been dispatched to a remote corner of the Tasmanian plateau to kill the last remaining thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger thought extinct since 1936. One female is alleged to still exist, and M’s employer, a shadowy biotech company, wants it dead. (An unfortunate implausibility, but we’ll get to that later.) Following the trail blazed by a naturalist who disappeared on the plateau, M establishes his base camp at the home of the naturalist’s grief-wrecked wife, Lucy, and their two unruly children. From there he makes weekly forays into the bush, immersing himself so deeply in the thylacine’s life that after a while he fears he himself is being hunted. And in a way he is: M, who’s made disassociating himself from people his life’s main tenet, finds himself being drawn further and further into the lives of Lucy and her children, hunted by his own humanity — prey, like the thylacine, to his very instincts.

Leigh’s debut resonates with ambitious echoes — she counts “Moby Dick,” for instance, as an inspiration — and almost lives up to them. So much so, in fact, that you want to excuse the novel for its chief shortcoming: namely, the improbably nefarious roots of M’s mission. Leigh tries to tiptoe around that pothole, but it’s a doozy, and mustering up the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Coleridge famously put it, requires a bit of readerly exertion. But Leigh’s stern, bristly prose is more than reward for that effort; her icy talent warrants heralding far beyond the antipodes.

– Jonathan Miles

The Elementary Particles
By Michel Houellebecq, Frank Wynne trans.
Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages

Michel Houellebecq’s jeremiad of a novel, the notorious near winner of this year’s Prix de Goncourt, is the story of two half-brothers, children of the ’60s, permanently screwed up by their parents’ quest for self-fulfillment — and by teen magazines, globalization, miniskirts, the Rolling Stones, the human potential movement, the cult of the body beautiful, New Age communes-turned-corporations, African dance classes, no-fault divorce, holistic medicine and every other artifact of the Generation Moi that Houellebecq manages to squeeze under his burning satirical lens.

Abandoned as a baby by his communard mother and Buddhist father, Michel grows up asexual, introverted and intellectually precocious. After the end of his one (platonic, teenage) romance and the death of the grandmother who raised him, Michel devotes the rest of his life (when he isn’t debilitatingly depressed) to theoretical biophysics — ultimately, to developing a race of clones, free of human misery and desire, who will render mankind obsolete and take over the world.

Bruno, Michel’s half-brother, has an even lonelier childhood, spent largely at a “progressive” boarding school (where he is literally made to eat shit) and permissive hippie campsites, where his mother hopes he’ll get over his “hangups about sex.” Easier said than done for Bruno, who learns early that the sexual revolution is in fact a war of all against all — and that he is bound to be one of the majority, i.e. the losers. Fat, balding, charmless, bitter and desperate for love, he grows up unable to attract anyone less obviously pathetic than he is. Quietly fired from his job as a schoolteacher for exposing himself to a student (she bursts out laughing); divorced from a wife (and son) he despises; addicted to sex clubs, whores and bourbon, Bruno works as a civil servant by day and by night vents his bile in reactionary, mostly unpublished articles and poems on “the suicide of the West.” What brings these stunted lives to crisis, and finally to grief, is the inability of either man to love when love is finally offered to him — an inability that Houellebecq traces, with parodic pseudoscientism (“A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975″), to postwar cultural and economic trends.

French and British critics have compared Houellebecq to Balzac, i.e. they have no idea what to make of him; it shows, in part, how badly our own best recent fiction has exported. American readers, accustomed to radical realism on a big scale, may be less impressed by the size of Houellebecq’s canvas than by the small, sad details that animate it. “The Elementary Particles” is grotesque and fantastical, full of loony physics, half-baked history and sociobiology, bad verse and sputtering misanthropy. It is also very funny, and sharply observed; but what makes it great satire, I think, is its childlike capacity for disappointment. Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn’t, his compassion can blow you away.

– Lorin Stein

Loving Graham Greene
By Gloria Emerson
Random House, 176 pages

Molly Benson, the protagonist in veteran foreign correspondent Gloria Emerson’s first novel, is a well-meaning, dotty, liberal heiress who lives in genteel squalor in tony Princeton, N.J. Molly spends her inheritance on a small foundation, through which she travels to third world countries to help worthy individuals. She’s driven by a desire to live out the ideals of her hero, novelist Graham Greene, with whom she carried on a polite correspondence following a single meeting, as well as to honor her brother, a foreign correspondent who was killed in Central America.

Upon Greene’s death, the doubly bereaved Molly decides to travel to war-torn Algeria. Her plan is to find persecuted writers and arrange for bodyguards for them, and off she goes, accompanied by her best friend, Bertie, and Toby, a fleshy, voluble, ineffectual British graduate student. (The two women think bringing a man along would be a good idea, and Toby is the best they can come up with.) Needless to say, once they arrive things go haywire almost immediately. They have overestimated the likelihood of two inexperienced Western women accomplishing anything in an Arab country and underestimated the seriousness of the civil war, which places them in grave danger and renders utterly laughable Molly and Bertie’s desire to make a dent in the suffering around them.

If all this sounds too heavy, rest assured that the vessel for these serious themes is a charming one. Emerson — whose “Winners & Losers,” a nonfiction book about the Vietnam War and its effect on Americans, won a National Book Award in 1978 — has a light touch. The novel’s warmhearted, forgiving quality softens the harsh light it shines on the dangerous naiveté of the self-serving Molly and her cohorts. It’s funny, too, full of arch satire of do-gooders and do-nothings alike. In its grasp of the places where world politics and drawing-room politics meet and the folly of individual Americans who try to enact their political and humanitarian ideals overseas, “Loving Graham Greene” is like a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn.

– Maria Russo

Don’t Tell Anyone
By Frederick Busch
W.W. Norton, 320 pages

“I am my own secret now … my darkest, best-held secret.” So said a fictionalized Herman Melville, deep in the long silence at the end of his life, as he is depicted in Frederick Busch’s haunting novel “The Night Inspector,” published just last year. The many characters in “Don’t Tell Anyone,” Busch’s new collection of 16 stories and a novella, are just as fully engaged, as the book’s title suggests, in the quiet containment of truth.

Busch has shifted scenes from the shadowy wharves and gaslit bordellos of Melville’s Manhattan to 20th century New York state, upriver from the big city, predominantly in and around what one character calls “what’s left of Dutchess County.” Here live people like Bob, the narrator of “Bob’s Your Uncle,” who shuttles every workday between his office in Manhattan and, just up the Henry Hudson Parkway, a home life that can be changed in an instant by the revelation of one long-dormant piece of information. The emotionally disturbed son of an old friend of Bob’s wife — a married woman with whom Bob long ago had a secret and profoundly affecting fling — suddenly appears on his doorstep. Before long, the energy of the boy’s imploding family, a force that has propelled him to seek refuge with his “uncle” Bob, will strip away the wrapping on Bob’s old secret adultery and send his marriage over the cliff.

There’s as much adultery and denial going on in the Hudson River towns of Busch’s bittersweet stories as ever was found in Cheever country, just slightly downriver and 20 years further removed in time. And like Cheever, Busch is an immensely intelligent and insightful writer. His dry sense of humor shows itself when a character describes a moment of awkward praise from his father: “He smiled at me as if I had done something noteworthy. That was why he was such a good junior high school principal. He discovered about eleven times a day that people were commendable, and they knew he thought so.”

Melville may have held his secrets close to the vest, but the people in Busch’s stories seem almost uniformly to settle for something less successful, but far more real. In the story “The Talking Cure,” Peter, who finds out about his mother’s affair with a local veterinarian, says of his father: “For the rest of the years of my life at home, I feared his deciding to tell me. He mercifully didn’t.” As in life, where most family secrets are a form of common knowledge kept, by unspoken agreement, just under the table, the characters in “Don’t tell Anyone” yearn not so much to change the past but to keep it in its place.

– Edward Neuert

The Family Orchard
By Nomi Eve
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages

Family stories, by definition, can’t belong to a solitary teller; to survive, they must be filtered through more than one consciousness. Nomi Eve’s debut novel, “The Family Orchard,” riffs on this theme as it chronicles six generations of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe, Israel and the United States. The book is written in two voices: Sections headed “I write” are the work of a woman named Nomi, while her father, Eliezer, contributes shorter sections headed “My father writes.” Nomi’s stories of her ancestors’ lives are at times presented in the enchanted, sensual language of fable. In a different typeface in inset boxes, her father relates the hard facts — dates, historical details, political history — in a direct, brass-tacks style.

The two streams of text are potentially a distracting gimmick, but it worked for me, making “The Family Orchard” feel modern and age-old at the same time. By now, the similarities between hypertext and ancient texts with commentary (such as the Talmud) are obvious, and it’s enjoyable to read a book that simply puts the device in play, without pretension or tedious self-consciousness. After all, one of the messages of the novel is that what’s old often becomes new again, especially when it comes to family history.

In the stories themselves, family traits are passed on through the generations in subtle and overt ways. Nomi’s great-great-great-grandmother, Esther, has an appetite for out-of-bounds sex and carries on a secret relationship with the neighborhood baker throughout her marriage. She dies giving birth to a son, who becomes immersed in an illicit passion with his stepsister. Eventually they are found out and allowed to marry. (“Imagine, a father and son married to a mother and a daughter!” writes Eliezer.) Nomi’s grandmother, Miriam, is an accomplished needlewoman who “sewed stories into her cloth,” a precursor to her story-weaving granddaughter. And so on.

Once the family is established in what will become Israel, their livelihood is citrus growing, and Eve makes full use of the metaphorical potential in the business of grafting and caring for their precious trees. At moments, especially as she gets closer to telling of her current life in sections directed to her own husband, Nomi’s heated language and lush imagery are perilously close to cloying and overripe; the book could have used trimming by a strict and unsentimental hand. But she’s hardly a Pollyanna — she records failure and disappointment, too, and painful mistakes that can’t be righted. The story of Nomi’s father’s brother Gavriel, for example, born with profound mental and physical defects and sent by his agonized parents to live in an institution, haunts all who follow in its wake. By deciding to speak his name no longer — to erase him from the family history — they have subjected themselves as well as their other children to a sentence far worse than they could have imagined.

– Maria Russo

The Fisher King
By Paule Marshall
Scribner, 224 pages

If you’re the adventurous and ambitious type, the kind who never quite fits in anywhere, traveling across the globe and blending in with strange cultures is easy. It’s going back home that’s hard. Paule Marshall’s long-overdue new novel is about just such a journey, a tale in which the distances of geography are smaller than the divisions caused by time and emotion.

In the late 1940s, jazz musician Sonny-Rett Payne leaves behind Brooklyn, N.Y., and his scornful, Mozart-loving family for the glamour and freedom of Paris. Decades later, his hometown stages a tribute to his memory, luring back both his 9-year-old namesake grandson and the boy’s caretaker, Hattie, another refugee from the old neighborhood who was once Sonny’s lover. The story weaves in and out between the characters’ memories and their current experiences, between the emotional baggage carried by Hattie and the innocent impressions of the child.

But what sets “The Fisher King” apart from the spate of teary-eyed novels about “healing” and “coming to terms” currently flooding the market is Marshall’s taut, unmelodramatic style and her rich, evocative flair for characters and landscapes. While the bond between young Sonny and his struggling ad hoc parent Hattie forms the soulful core of the story, the dynamics between the supporting players are just as intriguing. Sonny’s fearsome, feuding great-grandmothers are so vivid, they can break your heart even as you understand why they’d inspire their children to run the hell away. And author Marshall, who first wrote about Brooklyn 40 years ago in “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” intercuts skillfully between a romantic, revitalized borough and gritty, rain-soaked Paris to reveal an unexpected but utterly convincing side of both cities.

“There’s all kinds of family, and blood’s got nothing to do with it!” declares the fierce, protective Hattie, and Marshall herself is clearly a believer. As she recounts Hattie’s complicated affair with the misunderstood jazzman and the heartaches that have divided the little boy’s family for far too long, she gently reminds us that home is where we make it. And while kinship is indisputably a matter of random circumstance, it’s also, redemptively, very much one of choice as well.

– Mary Elizabeth Williams

Coney
By Amram Ducovny
The Overlook Press, 320 pages

Think Isaac Bashevis Singer with an intermittent but unflappable hard-on — and there you have Amram Ducovny’s “Coney,” a strangely beguiling coming-of-age story studded with fantastical forays into sexual mayhem. Harry Catzker, the novel’s protagonist, idles away his 15th year roaming the streets and alleyways of Coney Island circa 1939: He turns a budding naturalist’s eye on a pack of feral dogs, tracking their comings and goings and their curious infighting; he barrels down the boardwalk on his bicycle, racing his imaginary nemesis, a German liner captain whose ship lurks on the horizon; he engages the family’s boarder, a Polish imigri and Yiddish poet named Aba, in gloriously poetic conversations up in the backyard cherry tree; and he gets beneath-the-boardwalk blow jobs from Schnozz the old penny arcade owner.

Whoa there — what? Precisely. This debut novel by Ducovny, the father of “The X-Files” star David Duchovny and the author of 10 previous nonfiction works, seesaws between sweet, sepia-toned interludes from Harry’s adolescence — with some old-timey gangster intrigue thrown in for momentum — and jostling episodes of carnal pandemonium that include a circus-freak orgy, Harry’s deflowering at the hands of Fifi the Fat Lady and a wheelchair-bound crime boss and his dwarf henchman having sex with both ends of a prostitute while playing an invented game of cards on her back. Like Jerzy Kosinksi before him, Ducovny uses a child’s imagination as a device to explore the nether region between the probable and the improbable. The result is a saucy and affecting fable of Jewish life in America, an alluringly lurid novel bursting with a Gogolesque coupling of tragedy and comedy and twinkling with the decadence of Coney Island, that playground of yore of American desire.

–Jonathan Miles

Norwegian Wood
By Haruki Murakami
Vintage, 296 pages

Haruki Murakami is best known in this country for his distinctive and surreal novels like “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “A Wild Sheep Chase.” So it comes as no small surprise that the book that first earned him fame in his native Japan turns out to be a tender, straightforward coming of age story.

Published abroad in 1987 but only now translated and published here, “Norwegian Wood” introduces us to Toru Watanabe, a successful businessman who finds himself overwhelmed with emotion when he hears a muzak version of the Beatles classic on an airplane. As he swoons over the musical madeleine, he’s transported back to his days as a university student in Tokyo in the late ’60s and his anguished love for two women — fragile, enigmatic Naoko and wealthy, elusive Midori.

Watanabe vividly recounts his conflicts and complications, including the pain of watching Naoko slip out of his grasp and into madness. Along the way, he only occasionally veers into the maudlin, preferring instead to pepper his recollections with unexpected, welcome flashes of humor. While skillfully chronicling his helpless regard for the women who change his life, he broadens the picture. Here are dead-on observations of the frivolities of youth — the erotic escapades, the eccentric roommates, the pretentious multiple readings of “The Great Gatsby,” the endless nights of drinking and flirting and playing guitar.

Watanabe’s wry digressions only serve to make the impending disasters more believable — when, until we are very old, are we more susceptible to suffering than when we are very young and very sure of ourselves? Watanabe is hip deep in tragedies — his best friend commits suicide, Midori’s father wastes away and dies — but he boldly declares, “I’ve chosen to live.” Like all true survivors, though, he carries his past like a scar — it marks him, it’s part of him, but it only hurts when he reopens the wound.

The awkward fumblings and lonely regrets of a romantic college student may not be unique, but Murakami has such a warm, unaffected style it’s impossible not to be drawn in, and the setting — the Far East during the Free Love era — gives the novel an exotic shimmer. Like the song that haunts its hero, Murakami’s tale is a melancholy memory of what was and what could have been, a deft combination of adult wisdom and youthful heart.

–Mary Elizabeth Williams

Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Knopf, 181 pages

It’s rare these days to find Roman Catholic spirituality treated with the same straightforward, respectful sense of wonder as, say, Tibetan Buddhism, but “Lying Awake” does just that. The fifth novel by Mark Salzman, author of the acclaimed “Iron & Silk,” this slim, spare, beautifully written book tells the story of a Carmelite nun facing an agonizing personal decision. Sister John of the Cross has a rich, mystical spiritual life that includes frequent visions and ecstasies, many of which inspire the poetry that has won her a small following and financed much-needed repairs to her tiny, cloistered order’s monastery. But her visions are often preceded by blinding migraine headaches that leave her incapacitated, unable to participate fully in the rigorous life of her order. Should she follow her doctor’s recommendation that she undergo surgery to treat an epileptic disorder that is causing the migraines? The surgery threatens to confirm her deepest fear: that her visions have been false — not a sign of God’s proximity but merely a symptom of illness.

With a matter-of-fact ease that doesn’t exoticize Sister John’s intense religiosity, Salzman conveys her thought processes: When her prioress orders to her to stop reading in her cell at night — the others have noticed the light coming from under her door, and her wooziness during the day detracts from her presence in the community — he writes: “Sister John’s heart sank. Writing had become as important as prayer to her — it was prayer — but she also knew that the more perfectly a nun submitted to the will of the Superior, the more perfectly she submitted to the will of God. She directed her thoughts to her Innocent Spouse, who was executed for crimes he could not commit, and accepted her penance with a nod.”

Salzman also shows the camaraderie and unexpected humor of the Los Angeles Carmelite cloister, within earshot of the freeway but worlds away, where Sister John lives a rigidly disciplined life with seven other nuns, each with a distinct personality. And he’s just as good at drawing a picture of Sister John’s unhappy childhood, through flashbacks to her life as Helen, an unloved girl abandoned by her mother to the care of weary, distant grandparents.

Sister John is a wonderfully appealing character, full of goodness but with real, human wounds, at times just as prone to bitterness and selfishness as anyone else. But perhaps Salzman’s biggest accomplishment is in writing a novel that explores Christian faith from an almost anthropological distance but still makes palpable the emotions that draw people to religious life. “Lying Awake” makes us — even, I’d bet, those for whom religion is a foreign country — understand what’s at stake in one woman’s conflict between a mystical, transporting faith and a more prickly, mundane faith grounded in responsibility to others in the here and now.

–Maria Russo

Joe College
By Tom Perrotta
St. Martin’s Press, 306 pages

Before I left my small everytown for college, my high school boyfriend would insist that the only reason I wanted to go to an Ivy League university was so that I could meet a guy who drove a Ferrari. Stupidly, I defended myself and my desire to attend a school with good academics. Yet that fall, seated in English class beside boarding school boys who ably discussed Faulkner novels I’d never heard of, I couldn’t help wondering whether they really did drive $140,000 cars. Tom Perrotta, the author of “Election” and “The Wishbones,” has written a smart, engaging novel about a New Jersey native trying to bridge the two worlds of Yale University and his hometown, where he helps his father drive the Roach Coach, a lunch truck. “Joe College” is funny, honest and a fabulous read, especially for anyone who’s tried to fit in and let go — and to figure out what parts of themselves to hold onto in the process. As Perrotta shows — rich, poor, private- or public-schooled — it’s a universal identity crisis.

“Joe College” takes place during the early ’80s, the years of Reagan, bloated capitalism and Hall & Oates. But unlike those wonderful John Hughes movies of the same era, in which Molly Ringwald is either the pretty, popular, wealthy girl in diamond earrings or the hard-working, dorky one from the wrong side of the tracks, Perrotta manages to see the educated elites and working-class folks as more than caricatures. And for the first time, for me anyway, the airbrushed ’80s become a little bit smudged.

Danny works in the university cafeteria and from his dishwashing station he observes the difference between his townie co-workers and his prep school classmates, between himself and the hilariously right-on a cappella groups that serenade the diners. He lusts after girls who wear $5 vintage dresses and baggy sweaters and dream about Wallace Stevens, while his girlfriend Cindy from home, a secretary who didn’t go to college, slips into tight designer jeans, bright new white sneakers and loads on the blue eye shadow. Her dream is to get a new car. During Danny’s spring break he faces the Mafioso lunch truck bullies who threaten his father’s business and his own life, but it’s Cindy, surprising Danny with some bad news, who forces him to confront who he is and who he really wants to be. At one point, however, Danny admits that his life is like “a car with no brakes careening down a dangerous mountain road. Get in my way and I’ll run you down.”

Perrotta treats these people fairly — no one is better or worse than anyone else, the “poor” kids don’t come out on top in the end. You don’t hate the rich ones. Even the elusive Jodie Foster, who attended Yale at the time and inspires gossip and lust in everyone, from Danny’s Roach Coach customers to his Yalie friends, just fits. She’s part of the landscape and no more special than Danny’s surly, privileged friend Max, who neglects his classes to study the history of assassinations, or Lorelei, the hot New Haven cafeteria co-worker whose “greaser” brothers beat a Yalie’s face in when she sleeps with him. Every character, like “Joe College” itself, is lovable, resonant and memorable.

–Suzy Hansen

Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing
By David Leavitt
Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages

There’s something admirably gutsy about a writer breaking the literary fourth wall and allowing himself to become a character. Too often, however, the concept outshines the execution. Authors treat their fictionalized stand-ins too gently, or worse, turn them into embarrassing manifestations of their darkest neuroses. How refreshing, then, to discover a protagonist who bears a strong resemblance to his creator and is neither a saint nor a prick. And what a wicked pleasure to read a quasi-memoir so full of bittersweet remembrance and delectable literary dish.

The story will be familiar to anyone versed in the author’s own career — a young Ivy Leaguer with as much moxie as talent becomes the writing world’s flavor of the week after publishing the first gay-themed story in a prestigious weekly. But as he air-kisses his way through the ranks of Manhattan publishing during the Reagan era, Martin Bauman embarks on a bumpy path in which success alternates with humiliating failure. He also falls in and out of friendships and rivalries, awakens to the growing AIDS crisis, and romances fellow writer Eli Aronson. Through it all, he’s dogged by the specter of his irascible mentor, the awe- and loathing-inspiring Stanley Flint, and by the fear he’ll fulfill Flint’s grim prophecy: that Martin’s need to please will doom him to hackdom.

Leavitt, whose own works, “Family Dancing” and “The Lost Language of Cranes,” earned him early acclaim, allows his alter ego to be both painfully aware of his youthful weaknesses and amused by them as well. Martin is a bit of a stiff, throwing around 50-cent vocabulary words and Cliffs Notes literary allusions, but he’s also observant, ambitious and unapologetically giddy at his heady proximity to the heavyweights of the publishing scene. Leavitt offers the right amount of ’80s glitter, with characters and events so thinly disguised that even the most casual follower of literary gossip will be able to chortle in satisfied recognition.

While the recollections of an insular world nearly 20 years past may have particular resonance for the cosmopolitan literati (when was the last time a roman ` clef seemed so likely to inspire eyebrow raising among the Hamptons set?), it’s Leavitt’s willingness to tweak himself as much as anyone else, and his gift for making his characters complicated and intriguing, no matter what degree of real life familiarity they inspire, that makes “Martin Bauman” shine. Martin may be too “eager to pounce on a sure thing” to fulfill his creative destiny, but Leavitt has the spark and gumption of a writer just hitting his stride.

–Mary Elizabeth Williams

Ice Age
By Robert Anderson
University of Georgia Press, 200 pages

“Deft” is one of those adjectives you frequently see bandied about in blurbs on the back of short story collections, and with good reason: it’s vital that short fiction have that blend of skill and elegance. A novel can be a looser, rangy thing, and a novelist can ease up and paint big broad strokes for pages at a time, while the limitations of the form mean that a short story writer must wield a finer brush. The problem with short fiction, though, for a committed novel-lover like myself, is the almost claustrophobic feeling all those teeny brushstrokes can create. For me, finding a story collection like Robert Anderson’s “Ice Age” was like rounding a corner in a museum and coming upon a roomful of Edward Hoppers. I was filled with a delightfully alternating current of strangeness and familiarity, and knew I was in the hands of an artist whose intelligence and yes, deftness, thrilled me.

The 10 more-than-slightly absurd stories that make up “Ice Age” range all over the globe in setting, from New York in the 1960s to Rome, to Spain, Texas, Los Angeles and a Gulf War field hospital, and Anderson mixes both wholly created characters and familiar figures from the real world. Thus we are plunked into the mind of Norman Mailer on the legendary night he stabbed his wife, Adele. Or we spend a lonely evening in a hotel suite in Rome with Leonard Bernstein while he ponders a message sent to him by a saint. Or ride with the recently dead Jimi Hendrix on his journey to the underworld of L.A. It is a testament to Anderson’s skill that these real people become true characters in his work, not caricatures. Mailer has certainly spent a lifetime self-advertising and has never seemed in need of an agency to get the job done, but filtered though Anderson’s sensibility — a voice that can describe a West Coast hipster’s accent as “a variation on that early hour jazz DJ who utters ‘Brubeck’ with a stuttered lick like brush against drumhide” — the posturing blowhard becomes understandably human. And when Anderson turns away from the celebrities to write about a Texas family who bring in extra cash by running a potter’s field in their backyard, he carries with him that same knowing surety that makes the absurd seem like the everyday.

Not everything in “Ice Age” works — a long monologue by a low-level mobster’s wife seems jarringly contrived — but such moments are exceptions in what is an otherwise exceptional debut.

–Edward Neuert

Assorted Fire Events
By David Means
Context, 182 pages

Just about halfway through this collection of pristine stories, David Means begins a new one by writing, “I don’t want anyone to die in my stories anymore.” The story that follows, “What I Hope For,” no more than a page and a half long, describes a nameless couple enjoying an idyll at a bed and breakfast, potpourri and all. It’s a bit dull, and yet a fairly funny joke, for Means is proving to his readers that death and grief are his beat, what he does best. Simple happiness doesn’t bring out the best in him. If his stories leave us in a state of melancholy, feeling the slightly sweet ache of wounds that will never heal, who are we to complain that they lack uplift?

A few of the stories here experiment with form — a man’s mind flickers back and forth between the adulterous affair he’s consummating and memories of his brother’s death by drowning; various endings are offered for the fate of a bereaved businessman who stumbles down some rural train tracks and into the clutches of a gang of violent outcasts; a series of paragraphs illustrates the beauty and horror of fire — but none of these stories are cryptic, or even hard to follow. Clarity, in addition to an abiding preoccupation with catastrophic loss, is a signal trait of Mean’s fiction. When he abandons the paved paths of storytelling, it’s always to track down the nature and workings of emotion. Wherever he follows it, this is the kind of moment he seeks: “You drive up to it stunned and bent over with anguish at the very central fact that what was once around your life — objects of so-called sentimental attachment — is now ash.”

A builder barely registers his own complicity in a shoddy construction that costs a little girl her life, while her mother suffers unearned guilt. The brief disappearance of a friend reminds a young man of a dead schoolmate he might have been kind to, but instead tormented. A hungry homeless man intrudes on a wedding that celebrates the launch of a doomed marriage. A widow discourages a suitor by showing him a videotape of herself making love to her husband. A man who collects memories of “pure gestures” runs over a movie camera when he learns that the particularly fine gesture he just witnessed has in fact been faked. Despite their contemporary setting, Means’ stories have an elemental quality with echoes (some more explicit than others) of Greek myth and tragedy. Like those ancient works, they’re not comforting in any obvious way, but to the patient, attentive reader they bring a deep, enriching sense of the gravity of life.

–Laura Miller

Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories
By Patricia Henley
MacMurray & Beck, 357 pages

Many of the 19 stories in Patricia Henley’s collection “Worship of the Common Heart” take place in the isolated parts of the Western United States or small towns of the Midwest, where a transient stranger or a wandering hired hand can shake up people’s lives almost as much as birth or death. It is in these stories that Henley is in her glory: stripped of distracting outside influences, she can tear open the chests of her characters and hang their insides out to dry in the wind. In the simplest places, populated by people with simple lifestyles, Henley can expose the tumult and complexity within.

Henley, author of “Hummingbird House,” a National Book Award finalist, wrote the stories in this collection over the course of 20 years, but the themes and the stark rendering of pain and beauty emanate from the same place, in a voice, uniquely Henley’s, that speaks through her strong, vibrant characters. Her people live where down-and-out mothers drink gin out of old jelly jars and smoke Virginia Slims, where families clash, divide and send young children to relatives’ homes and orphanages, where women work the land and lay naked and free in the sun after a day’s toil, and where the past and the present coexist bittersweetly in a warm, webby alcove of the mind.

Henley’s characters have names like Celestial, Birch and Rein. Some are nuns, some fruit pickers and some housewives. They’ve suffered difficult childhoods, years of disappointment and hard luck in love. Their men, their mothers or their fathers are usually absent, either in body or spirit. Often, Henley’s depictions of women, especially young women, recall those of Margaret Atwood; her subtle observations, and their sly intents, linger. In “Sun Damage,” Hannah forces her young daughter Meg to remain in the room every time Rex, the diaper deliverer, stops by — presumably to prevent anything scandalous from happening. Meg observes Hannah “put on a gold cross pendant that slipped perilously between her breasts. You would never notice Hannah’s modest neckline of her modest blouse if not for that cross.” Henley’s ability to show how religion, desire, right, wrong, prudence and pleasure can be welded together within the careful words of two natural, ambling sentences is one of her most thrilling talents. She can effortlessly move between past and present, memory and reality, without disturbing the momentum of the story. Instead, she raises the stakes.

When Henley completes a story, a scene, even a paragraph, she leaves her readers slightly stung, but grateful at the gift of an unvarnished truth. By the end of “Worship of the Common Heart” doesn’t feel like separate stories. It feels as though you’ve read a satisfying novel, one that lovingly lays bare the story of an aged, weather-worn but still beating heart.

–Suzy Hansen

The Sugar Island
By Ivonne Lamazares
Houghton Mifflin, 205 pages

This debut novel by Cuban-born Lamazares paints a haunting, vivid yet elliptical picture of life on the island in the wake of the revolution. It’s the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the shadow of the unknown world beyond barricaded Cuba looms large for Lamazares’ heroine, Tanya. Her unhappy, erratic, desperate mother joins the rebel guerrilleras, returns, attempts a sea escape and eventually is taken away by the party for “rehabilitation,” leaving Tanya and her brother Emanuel to live in Havana with an old aunt. Defeated but still defiant, Mama rejoins the family and is assigned to work in a matchstick factory. By night, she is pulled into a neighbor’s Santerma rituals, and Tanya watches with growing horror as her mother slips ever farther away while grave, inchoate dangers seem to loom everywhere.

Full of well-chosen details and an understated emotionalism, “The Sugar Island” economically conveys a sense of life in Cuba: the deprivations, the bizarre juxtapositions of party rhetoric, Catholic rituals and voodoo, the small victories of tenacious Cubans determined to hold fast to their dignity and traditions.

But Lamazares’ central subject is really Tanya’s growing estrangement from her mother and the toll their fraught relationship takes on her as she grows to womanhood. The more Tanya learns of her mother’s slippery heart, the less she trusts that Fidel’s revolution is the sole cause of their misery. And yet the outward signs of the revolution’s corruption and failure are obvious. Eventually, Tanya is forced to choose between a perilous raft escape to Miami with her mother or a life in Cuba, left behind and watching her options crumble around her. Like the rest of the novel, what happens to Tanya in the end may seem to be full of the tragic ironies that are the lot of the Cuban-born, but Lamazares’ subtle intelligence manages to wrest imaginative possibilities out of even the most dire situations.

–Maria Russo