Good writers are like good singers. They have a sense of rhythm and style; they understand tone; they hit the right notes effortlessly, or make it seem so. Like good singers, good writers also have distinctive voices.
Just as we can distinguish Sinatra from Sting, we know McMurtry from Marquez.
June's new fiction is blessed with a whole choir of distinctive literary voices, none more so than newcomer Lenore Hart's, whose first book is a lyrical tale of devotion, duty and love.
Waterwoman (Berkley, 241 pages, $21.95) tells the story of Annie Revels, a girl growing up among the fishermen of the Eastern Shore in the early 20th century. It's a hard life that becomes harder still when Annie's father dies and she must take to the water to support her mother and younger sister. Soon after, Annie falls for 30-year-old Nathan Combs, a local hunting guide, and her world is irrevocably changed.
The isolated setting and the focus on only five characters gives Waterwoman a mythic quality. Nathan is like Eve's apple; once the naive and untutored Annie tastes him, she discovers love, shame, hate, desire and ultimately, a profound understanding of herself.
The story is simple - boy meets girl and hearts break - but it's elevated by such complex issues as sisterhood and selflessness and by Hart's language. The writing in Waterwoman is as pure as the waters of the pre-industrial Chesapeake. Her descriptions are utterly convincing and beautifully sensual. You feel the shell cuts, the pull of the nets. Hart, who has lived on the Eastern Shore, clearly loves the place and, more importantly, her characters, and she's turned that love into a remarkable debut.
A far more familiar literary voice appears in The Old Religion (Overlook Press, 194 pages, $14.95), David Mamet's chilling re-animation of the infamous case of Leo Frank. In 1913, a young woman was found murdered in the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. After the factory's Jewish manager, Leo Frank, was convicted of the crime on the flimsiest of evidence, a mob pulled him from his cell and lynched him.
Mamet's narrative approach is unusual. Most of the time, the reader is inside Frank's head and the signature staccato dialogue, heard in such Mamet plays as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross and in such films as last year's Heist, has become monologue. Frank is a comfortable burgher who wants only to be accepted and he focuses his thoughts on daily trivia and arcane Talmudic arguments - anything to avoid the growing horror. As a result, we only dimly perceive the progression of events, though we know he's doomed.
The Old Religion is a powerful meditation on the Jew as The Outsider, The Pathogen. Leo Frank takes his place in a canon of characters that includes Shylock, the hero-schlumps of Woody Allen and Leopold Bloom.
Frank's need for assimilation is pathetic, his self-delusion heart wrenching.
And when his anger bursts forth, it burns with the righteousness of the oppressed.
Another distinctive stylist is Darin Strauss, whose acclaimed first book, Chang and Eng, was a delightful best seller in 2000. That novel was based on historic characters - conjoined Siamese twins who became a sideshow attraction in the mid 19th century - and his latest, The Real McCoy (Dutton, 326 pages, $24.95), is peppered with such real characters as D.W. Griffith and boxer "Gentleman" Jim Corbett. But this time the hero, while loosely based on a boxer who once fought Corbett, is more archetype than historic.
"Kid" McCoy is a kind of turn-of- the-century Madonna. He's vain and self-promoting and in his search for fame, he's stretched his talents to the breaking point. He's also a flim-flammer who has stolen his identity from another man.
It's the book's central irony that the "Real" McCoy is so fundamentally fake. And yet, McCoy is not unsympathetic. In his journey from Midwest farm to bare-knuckle boxing arena to the glittering halls of New York City, McCoy is wracked by guilt and humanized by his honest love for the beautiful show girl Susan Fields. He's also quintessentially American; when a scam falls flat, he simply remakes himself and starts anew.
In Kid McCoy's time, America was turbulent and exploding with social change; The Real McCoy is written to match. It's loud, muscular and full of outlandish characters. It's also out of control - the chronology is too tricky and the ending is rushed. Still, it's a wild and joyful ride getting there.
Not every distinctive voice works (think Tiny Tim). In Strand of a Thousand Pearls (Random House, 247 pages, $24.95), Dorit Rabinyan tries to turn a family story into a magical realist fable. But it's like gluing peacock feathers on a jaybird. It may look fantastical, but it won't fly.
From Jewish immigrant stock, the Azizyan family lives in modern-day Israel. Each Azizyan is an encyclopedia of quirks and flaws. Marcelle never sleeps; Lizzie is sex obsessed; Matti is haunted by her dead twin brother; Iran, the matriarch, weeps, worries, and cooks. Rabinyan tries to imbue the family's weddings, births, birthdays with wonder and significance but, in fact, not much happens to the Azizyan's and we don't really care when it does.
Thinner, Blonder, Whiter (Carroll & Graf, 316 pages, $25), the debut novel by Elizabeth Maguire, mixes social commentary with murder mystery. All the characters seem hatched from the columns of New York magazines.
Julia Moran, who's white, is a top editor at a publishing house. She specializes in African-American authors and she's sleeping with one of them, the charismatic professor-writer Sam Reid. Sam happens to be married, and Julia happens to be a mess because of it. Then things really unravel when a friend of Julia's is found murdered and Sam is kidnapped.
A complicated power struggle and double-cross unfolds against a background of sex, drugs and racial politics. But the tension is defused by a slow-moving plot and cliche characters that could have come from a Law & Order episode. It doesn't help that Maguire attempts a pulp fiction style while her heroine wears heels and spends most days by a computer answering the phone.
John Muncie is former arts and entertainment editor of The Sun. He has been travel-books columnist at the Los Angeles Times and assistant managing editor for features at The San Diego Union. His first novel, Thief of Words, will be published in spring 2003.