THE BOOKS OF SUMMER

(A FICTION ISSUE)

AS THE SWEETEST SEASON RETURNS, WE SEEK THAT STATE OF TEMPORARY GRACE TO BE FOUND IN STORIES AND STORYTELLING

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 8, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

``A lie,'' said the wise old owl, ``will remove you from all sorts of obligations, and make others believe anything you want, and generally result in your being left alone. A story, on the other hand, if it is told well, will get you into a passel of trouble. Creatures will think you know the truth and follow you everywhere, and there will be many more demands on your time and heart than if you had simply done the wrong thing, and told a lie.''

Though I never actually overheard the hedgehog's query, their conversation is more story than lie, since the owl is standing in for wisdom to make a larger point. Had I given him a secret past or a mustache, or thrown in a couple of wars or drawing-room memories, I'd have a longer flight of fancy on my hands (and maybe a book contract). The lie retaliates against the imagination; the story evinces it -- not so much manipulating reality as ignoring it altogether. When we follow our literary hobbits -- the owl, or Anna Karenina, or Jason Compson -- into the shadows and sunlight of their defiantly other worlds, we're charmed into a suspended state of temporary grace, where someone else is minding the store back home. This is fiction's lure and implicit contract, and there is no safer or more heartening respite from the woes of the hard ground under one's feet: Poetry, like Everest, is exhilarating but more laborious; nonfiction, like a back-yard party down the street, never really leaves the neighborhood. But a good-enough novel! Would that every one of them sent me atumble once again, toward that place where the colors are brighter, the human spirit grander, the language, like Flaubert's, yet another striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

We dancing bears, in the meantime, are just trying to get the cracked pots packed on top of the car and get out of town -- or take a less geographically determined vacation by finding the right summer reading. It's a particular kind of literary furlough, isn't it? Whether one's tastes tend toward Grisham or Borges, the list needs to guarantee retreat: to soften the hard edges of the mind without turning it to mush; to promise that sweet elixir that, too often, belongs to an earlier literary innocence. I remember one broiling Texas season of adolescence when, duty-bound to a boring summer job, I escaped each day at noon to the air-conditioned corner drugstore, where I blissfully ate grilled-cheese sandwiches and read another 50 pages of Ayn Rand's ponderous and pulpy ``Atlas Shrugged.'' ``Crime and Punishment'' had gotten me through the winter; now I needed the romance and reactionary ease of Dagney Taggart's enchantments. Her literary merit notwithstanding (all I remember of John Galt's interminable speech is ``A is A''), Rand had done the trick for a teen-ager's yearnings. She had taken me far, far away upon request, then delivered me home again unjailed, unhurt, and no less irritable or estranged than I had been upon departure.

In that spirit -- with nods to the sacred and profane -- we meander through the bookstores' treasures this month, with special attention to new and recent fiction, and idiosyncratic attention to the genre we'll call everlasting summer.

True Pynchonians will have already queued up for their copies of the postmodern master's ``Mason & Dixon,'' but lollygaggers will need to be reminded (and might want to try ``Gravity's Rainbow'' instead). Philip Roth has proved himself still diabolical this spring by giving us ``American Pastoral,'' which is as deliberately sweet and luminescent as anything he's ever written. Smaller masterly contributions can be found in Saul Bellow's novella, ``The Actual'' -- a soliloquy from an eminently Bellovian man -- and Robert Stone's first collection of stories, ``Bear and His Daughter.'' Canadian poet Anne Michaels has planted her own flower in this garden with her first novel, ``Fugitive Pieces,'' an exquisitely lush novel about a boy's reckoning with the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Respectable Gothic has been enjoying a field day this year, with Margaret Atwood's ``Alias Grace'' offering deep pleasures from a journey within the private consciousness of a convicted murderess. Patrick McGrath, who seems to cherish the moors and rainswept secrets of the genre, has gone grislier than ever with ``Asylum'' (his dark-hearted ``Dr. Haggard's Disease'' has just been released in paperback). Dennis McFarland has given a wink to Jamesian ghost stories with an American-gone-haywire-in-London novel, ``A Ghost at the Window.'' Edna O'Brien's ``Down by the River'' contains a searing tragedy -- an Irish girl's pregnancy by her father -- within a mildly Gothic framework; the inimitable William Trevor achieved something similar two years ago in his serial-killer novel, ``Felicia's Journey.''

John le Carre's ``The Tailor from Panama'' is classic literary entertainment, mixing the finery of le Carre with an evocation of Graham Greene's ``Our Man in Havana.'' This calls to mind all of le Carre -- and all of Greene, for that matter. If you've not entered their labyrinthine worlds before, you can't do better for summer espionage fare than the Smiley books or a few others, ``The Perfect Spy'' and ``The Little Drummer Girl'' among them. Likewise for Greene, whose ``The Power and the Glory,'' ``The Quiet American,'' and ``Brighton Rock'' will capture anyone possessing a slate-gray-or-darker modern world view.

The lesser category of contemporary gotcha! novels will be doing a bang-up business this summer, with two biotech-mayhem stories at the head of the list: John Case's ``Genesis Code,'' which credibly manages to combine murder and the Vatican, and Robin Cook's ``Chromosome 6,'' where the only good guys are primates. Brad Meltzer's swiftly paced legal thriller, ``The Tenth Justice,'' wants to be the next Scott Turow and isn't -- too many potholes -- but it will amuse summer interns on break from law school. Drawn to its Jack London-esque life-in-the-wild offerings, I sought escape in Mark T. Sullivan's ``The Purification Ceremony,'' but soon wished I hadn't; it's too gruesome, with little else to redeem it. For the icy realms of the natural world, you'll do better working harder in the territory of real literature, with Cormac McCarthy's ``All the Pretty Horses'' and ``The Crossing'': The latter has a wolf in a starring role as memorable as any quadruped since Buck in ``The Call of the Wild.''

Political bunnies still mourning the passing of Anonymous (the author of ``Primary Colors'' turned out to be mere mortal Joe Klein) might do well to partake of Ward Just's Washington novels, including the just-published ``Echo House.'' Purists and pre-Watergate Luddites will return, as I recently did, to the granddaddy of them all, in Robert Penn Warren's ``All the King's Men,'' or to his naughty stepson, in William Brammer's ``The Gay Place.'' Paranoiacs who aren't quite up to the weight and whimsy of Pynchon will find wry and less overwhelming refuge in Don DeLillo; as he has a new novel appearing next autumn, now is a good time to catch up on the older work, including ``White Noise,'' ``Great Jones Street,'' and ``Mao II.''

A friend who loves Swift and Dickens asked for a reading list recently, and I was alarmed to realize I couldn't think of anyone funny enough to measure up. Brits are funnier than Americans, anyway, so I told him to go read Kingsley Amis's ``Lucky Jim'' and Evelyn Waugh's ``Scoop.'' But I might have also mentioned Kingsley's dour and brattish son Martin, whose ``The Information'' is surly but very funny, along with Jane Smiley's academic sendup, ``Moo,'' and the wilder ride of E. Annie Proulx's ``Accordion Crimes.'' For hilarity, heft and intellectual prowess, David Foster Wallace's ``Infinite Jest'' will get you through a heat wave, though you may want to start smaller with his story collection, ``Girl with Curious Hair.''

Joining those in paper are some of the best works of English-language fiction from the past few years. Britisher Pat Barker's war trilogy, comprising ``Regeneration,'' ``The Eye in the Door,'' and ``The Ghost Road,'' is old-fashioned Hemingway prose; ``The Ghost Road'' won the coveted Booker Prize, but ``Regeneration'' is the best of the three. Graham Swift got Bookered the following year for ``Last Orders,'' an honor he certainly deserved: The novel is a sparse, elegiac account of war buddies on their way to scatter their friend's ashes. (Swift has come under fire from an academic with too much time on his hands for the book's alleged similarity to Faulkner's classic coffin tale, ``As I Lay Dying,'' but seeing the parallel as anything other than allusive homage is absurd. At any rate, it's a good excuse to read them both.)

Roddy Doyle's ``The Woman Who Walked into Doors'' accomplishes similar grandeur in voice with his first-person deliverance of an Irish woman whose husband nearly beat her to death. For purists who haven't tired of the cinematic overkill of ``The English Patient,'' there's the poetic novel itself, wherein Michael Ondaatje dared to concentrate on Hana, her burn-victim patient, and the gentle sapper rather than a mere desert romance. But if it's celluloid love you're after, John Updike revealed his affinity for the movies last year with ``In the Beauty of the Lilies,'' a four-generational novel of Updikean sheen about America's search for something holy. Richard Powers, whose cerebral wanderings often sacrifice style for brain power, paid tribute to literature in ``Galatea 2.2,'' about Helen, a computer that (who?) learns how to read.

Which is, after all, the point. With memories of Charlotte Bronte on a twilight beach and Virginia Woolf through a sweltering July, I intend to lug nothing but old, old, old on holiday. I'll try ``Parade's End'' again, Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy about World War I, and maybe Waugh or Forster, and Hardy for certain, if melancholy, respite. Maybe none of them will get read. But I will surely sleep better knowing they are there, loyal and enduring, ready to promise me anything and then carry me home.