DISCOVERIES

WINDCHILL SUMMER By Norris Church Mailer; Random House: 396 pp., $24.95

Can a woman write the great American novel? Would a woman want to? There’s a village in Denmark called Skagen that has its own school of painters because the light is so eerily beautiful. In the 19th century, the men traditionally painted the sea and the boats and the horizon. The women began painting the kitchens and the people and the food and the chairs they sat on. Seen together in the village museum, they form what feels like a complete portrait of life in that village, in that light. I suspect that Norris Church Mailer has chosen her material not only from what she knows, namely, life in small-town Arkansas in the ‘60s, but also from what her husband, Mailer the Minotaur, doesn’t know: how teenage girls felt growing up in America in that decade, what choices they faced, how they dodged fate, what it was like to kiss a man who’d just come home from Vietnam. “Windchill Summer” is a carefully constructed, densely detailed, pulsing book, slightly old-fashioned, with a moral whiff of Theodore Dreiser, a Southerner’s rollicking plot and the sly humor of Flannery O’Connor.

A MAN OF CHARACTER By Paola Capriolo; Serpent’s Tail: 214 pp., $15

Do Italians strive to write the great Italian novel? One of the questions that meanders through European fiction is: Do we control nature or revel in its wildness? Style often draws its best inspiration from nature, and Italians, notoriously stylish, approach all formality, in the garden or the museum, with a certain humor. Erasmo Stiler, an engineer, struggles in Paola Capriola’s novel to turn the garden of his villa into “a sort of Versailles,” inculcating “Euclid’s postulates into the very heart of organic nature.” This “poet of coldness,” as one character calls him, approaches women and love in a similar way and, in the process, destroys himself. His mild-mannered narrator, Danielle Bausa, engages the engineer in philosophical debates that are the heart of the book. Philosophy rather than morality, dialogue instead of plot: these qualities, apparent in “A Man of Character,” make European fiction so distinctly different from American fiction.

LITTLE SAINT by Hannah Green; Random House: 278 pp., $25.95

“When I first saw Sainte Foy,” writes Hannah Green of the statue in the chapel at Conques, a French town where she and her husband lived for several years, “the top gone from my head, I seemed to see through the walls of what we ordinarily call reality her perfect body and soul, preserved as radiance in the space of her statue.” Green, whose style is reminiscent of Eleanor Clark and M.F.K. Fisher, was the author of the critically acclaimed novel, “The Dead of the House.” She wrote frequently for The New Yorker in the 1960s and ‘70s, began writing this book about the village of Conques in 1971, finished it in 1996 and died that year. Her picture of the village begins with the little saint, who was martyred for cleaving to one Christian God in 303, at age 12, by the Emperor Diocletian during what came to be known as the Grand Persecution. But Green sees Sainte Foy (called the Little Joker, “Joculatrix. Joglaresse,” by troubadours down through the ages) in the hearts and souls of several citizens of Conques: Jean Segalat, the painter; Pere Andre, the curate; Madame Cannes, the proprietor of the Hotel Sainte Foy; and others. Green makes a pilgrimage, in the course of the book, from Le Puy to Conques, but reading “Little Saint” is itself a kind of pilgrimage. As in the most compelling portraits of places, built outward from its spiritual life, the air is good in this book. Serpont (wild thyme), mint, wild carnations, blackberry hedges and dark volcanic rock frame the little village. A reader feels an appetite, for the chestnut cake made by Green’s neighbor, Rosalie, for a salad of frisee and goat cheese, for the red wine of Cahors, for a life of faith.

STOP BREAKING DOWN By John McManus; Picador: 272 pp., $18

“I’m so Goth I’m dead,” one character says to another in “Die Like a Lobster,” one of the stories in this collection by 22-year-old John McManus. “Well, I’m so Goth, I’m a cathedral,” returns the purple-haired, black-nailed person on the other end of the conversation. Here is rage on the page, with Denis Cooper-style nihilists who don’t even try to learn why they are so messed up. Fighting parents, shame-tripping fathers are alluded to, but so are heavy metal and crystal meth. It’s a whole environment, with a new food chain, and yes, I want to know about it. McManus is all ears. When he editorializes, as in the collection’s first story, he does it by stepping into a character’s skin: a young boy with an abusive grandfather, or a victim of gay bashers. It’s a tough job, making these characters accessible enough for us to stay with them, bereft of epiphany, bereft of future.