DISCOVERIES

MUSIC FOR TORCHING; By A.M. Homes; (Rob Weisbach / William Morrow: 358 pp., $26)

A. M. Homes, God bless her, will never be mid-list. It is possible that she has never written a predictable word in her life. Previous novels, like “In a Country of Mothers” and her most recent, “The End of Alice” (about a young girl and a convicted pedophile), have earned her fear, respect and some shockingly bad reviews. When marketing uses the word “brave” to describe an author, you know it means “we are brave to publish this incredibly risky but undeniably talented writer.”

If you caught the story the novel is based on in The New Yorker, you know that “Music for Torching” reveals the very deepest fissures in modern life: greater and greater need in the glaring face of greater and greater ability to meet all needs, an increasing lack of control in spite of all the things being created to help us gain control. In the first 10 pages, Elaine and Paul, the parents of two young sons who live in a fancy suburb, are portrayed as despicable, spineless, alcoholic perverts. After they try, in a drunken bid for some excitement, to burn down their own house, they are offered shelter at their next door neighbors’, a true Stepford couple from the sparkling Formica to the waffle breakfasts to the sex-starved housewife.

It is here that we begin to suspect that society is to blame. Elaine and Paul are square pegs in round holes, but the round holes lead straight to a spiritual void. Homes doesn’t flinch in her Littleton-like ending. She knows, from writing about art, that art can’t flinch when it shows how life spins out of control. If it does, it’s just art.

WHO’S IRISH? By Gish Jen; (Alfred A. Knopf: 208 pp., $22)

More pain. More shame. In these stories about Chinese Americans, Gish Jen soars above racial platitudes to reveal the effects of isolation and racism inside families. There are kids in a welfare hotel mugging an Asian man, a father who pushes his wife out the bedroom window, fathers beating women and children, upper-middle-class rednecks who insult Asian men in front of their families. Children watch. Children are humiliated and scared. Grown ups are strangers in their own homes, in their neighborhoods, alone with themselves. Jen is particularly interested in the mother-daughter relationship in Chinese American families and the pain that is revealed in formal rituals like weddings and baby showers. In the title story, the Chinese mother, who has been kicked out of her daughter’s home for spanking her granddaughter as she would have in China, goes to live with her daughter’s husband’s mother, who is Irish. “I like to mention this,” she says of the Irish: “Their talk just stick.” Jen uses vernacular to season the stories, which meander through these lives as though they patrolled the neighborhood--a powerless security force.

HUMAN VOICES; By Penelope Fitzgerald; (Mariner Books: 144 pp., $12 paper)

Penelope Fitzgerald, author most recently of the much acclaimed novel “The Blue Flower,” worked for the BBC during World War II. Set in London during the air raids, “Human Voices” revolves around two high-level BBC directors: Sam and Jeff, perfectly painted Old Servants, each with his respective varieties of genius and weakness. Sam, for example, needs very young women to work for him: He never makes sexual advances, he just needs them to confide in. Jeff, on the other hand, seems “to have forgotten how to go home.” The novel is a character study of the BBC--the lifeline between London and the troops in wartime, the dispenser of uncensored truth to the public, an organization with as much personality and as enjoyable to read about as our New Yorker. Ethical dilemmas arise: There is the French general who exhorts the British to surrender and then dies on the air and the pregnant intern who gives birth in the concert hall and the romance that inevitably springs up between Sam and a 17-year-old recorded programmes assistant. Daily life goes on between bombs, emotions at a pitch: “Maintenance was probably at work already on the broken pipes, catering brewed away remorselessly in the basement, but the problem remained: What should the voices say?”

NOTES OF A DESOLATE MAN; By Chu T’ien Wen; Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin; (Columbia University Press: 169 pp., $19.95)

Here is the story of a gay man’s unraveling and more: a literary chronicle of the stations of human unraveling. Here are withdrawal, isolation, corruption, paralysis, remorse and numbness. In the background of the novel are Taiwan’s precarious history with China, a great deal of brooding about identity and sexuality and the role culture and literature play in defining and clarifying identity and sexuality. Chu T’ien Wen takes his cues from Levi-Strauss to Foucault (“I followed him up to the lofty mountain crags,” writes Xiao Shao, the narrator of Foucault, “but the road ended at the edge of the sky, and there he disappeared”) to Thomas Mann (in a scene in which Shao thinks of picking up a young video game-obsessed boy nicknamed Fido) and the movie “The Fly.” The book, which has won the China Times Novel Prize, begins and weaves around the death of Xiao Shao’s childhood friend, Ah Yao, of AIDS. It is a stylish meditation on marginalization, radicalization and decay.

INVENTING PARADISE: The Greek Journey, 1937-1947; By Edmund Keeley; (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 270 pp., $24)

Much like California in the ‘30s, Greece was a place where a creative spirit could heal from the insults of American and European culture. Edmund Keeley, who has written about Greece in his fiction and nonfiction for decades, translating among many others the work of Yannis Ritsos, follows Henry Miller on his first and last trip to Greece. Looking for freedom, Miller found it there in the company of a group of writers and artists, the prewar generation that included Katsimbalis, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Ritsos and visitors like Lawrence and Gerald Durrell. “The true Greek,” Katsimbalis tells Miller, “is a god, not a cautious, precise, calculating being with the soul of an engineer.” “You’ve become businessmen,” he says, speaking of American writers, “You’re all castrated. . . . [Your language] sounds like wooden money dropping into a sewer.” As Miller’s guide, he reveals Greece: “thyme, sage, tufa . . . the electrical crackle that plays over the low hills like a swift serpent with a broken spine.” Falling in love with Greece, Keeley quotes Miller, “is like falling in love with one’s own divine image reflected in a thousand dazzling facets.”