One of the great satisfactions of fiction is its way of immersing the reader in an exotic milieu. Take Nancy Zafris' second book, for example, through which this ignorant reader learned many remarkable things about a totally unfamiliar subject: scrap metal.
The Metal Shredders (BlueHen Books, 320 pages, $24.95) is the funny and surprisingly poignant story of John Bonner, a third-generation partner in his family's prosperous scrap business in Columbus, Ohio. Suffering through a recent separation from his wife, John must also contend with an overbearing father, a snobbish mother, an artsy sister who's taken a sudden interest in the business, and a throng of kooky employees.
He's also responsible for the maintenance of the fearsome Shredder, which uses 34 magnesium teeth, each weighing 255 pounds and each hitting its target 950 times a minute, to reduce cars to little piles of metal, plastic and fluff.
Zafris' tale takes off when John and several of his workmen find a stash of drug money in the trunk of a soon-to-be-shredded LTD. The ill-gotten cash, which bears the resilient stink of the decomposing murder victims with whom it was found, provides a welcome diversion for John as he ponders both how to deodorize and how to spend the money. While the eccentricities of plot, setting and character here are delightful, The Metal Shredders is most effective in delineating the obligations and disappointments of family life -- particularly those of a family in business, for better or worse, together.
Another second novel, about an equally exotic world, is Sanjay Nigam's Transplanted Man (Morrow, 352 pages, $24.95), set in a busy urban hospital in New York's Little India. Sonny Seth is a gifted young resident whose most illustrious patient is a high-level Indian politician with a rare disease.
Known as the Transplanted Man, the politician has undergone every organ transplant known to medicine, and it's Sonny's job to keep him alive, in secrecy, in order to prevent his political rivals back in India from stealing power.
Teeming with minor characters and manic in its plot, Nigam's novel has a lot to say about the disconnection between dreams of India and its realities, from the perspectives of both Indian immigrants and American Indophiles.
Nigam is a distinguished kidney specialist whose first novel, The Snake Charmer (1998), was widely hailed. Transplanted Man, broader and bolder in subject and setting, is an even more thoroughly impressive effort.
When it was first published in 1905, Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg's Doctor Glas created a scandal with its explicit treatment of sexuality and violence. Long out of print in English and now reissued with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, Doctor Glas (Anchor Books, 150 pages, $12) is an elegant little psychological study that has retained its ability to shock, less now for its subject matter than for its breathtakingly modern technique.
Written as a diary, the novel tells the story of a Stockholm doctor who tries to rescue a young woman from her stultifying marriage to a creepy old clergyman, with murderous results. Full of anxious equivocation, unsettling dreams and loads of guilt, the novel resonates, as Atwood points out, with murmurs of Freud, Dostoevski and Poe; and, in its collage-like pastiche of styles, it seems to anticipate the surrealists and Joyce.
Anchor Books has performed a valuable service in reissuing this disturbing little jewel of a book.
Jasmine Paul is a first-time novelist whose coming-of-age tale, A Girl, in Parts (Counterpoint, 224 pages, $24) recalls lots of other similar books -- Mary Karr's The Liar's Club particularly comes to mind -- but manages to add a unique voice to the genre.
Set in Martinsburg, W. Va., and eastern Washington State in the 1980s, the novel tells of Dottie, an awkward child with a complicated family life. She lives with her barmaid mother, alcoholic stepfather and developmentally delayed little brother, but spends her summers hopping from Cleveland to see her father, then on to the Ohio farm of one set of grandparents, followed by the Detroit home of the other set.
This would be confusing for any child, but when her stepfather moves the family to Washington, Dottie must learn to maneuver among her Colville Indian classmates in an entirely new environment. Honest, plucky, funny and sharp, Dottie is a refreshingly unsentimental and entirely sympathetic young heroine.
Finally, two novels set in Israel provide illuminations about its citizens with contrasting degrees of success. Husband and Wife (Grove Press, 320 pages, $24), by the well-known Israeli literary editor Zeruya Shalev, and Between Two Deserts (MacAdam / Cage, 158 pages, $24), a first novel by journalist Germaine W. Shames, offer strikingly different views of Israelis engaged in love and war.
Like David Grossman's recent novel Be My Knife, Shalev's book is an acutely intimate portrait of a relationship, in this case the disintegrating marriage of a Jerusalem couple. Married when they were young, Udi and Na'ama have struggled for years to repair their marriage, which reaches a crisis one morning when Udi, a robust tour guide, wakes up unable to move his legs.
When doctors conclude that his problem is purely psychological, this couple proceeds to strip away the remains of their relationship until nothing is left except bitterness and humiliation.
Narrated by Na'ama in long, incantatory sentences, this almost completely interior tale is harrowingly thorough in its cataloguing of marital defeat.
Thick as Shalev's book is with suffering, Germaine Shames' Between Two Deserts offers storytelling that is strikingly more flimsy. Eve Cavell, a beautiful American, comes to Jerusalem to find her roots, but instead becomes embroiled in a doomed affair with a handsome Palestinian boy.
Though told from many different points of view -- an elderly Jewish author, the Palestinian boy's militant aunt, an army officer -- Eve remains the center of attention, yet she is too insubstantial a character to carry the weight of the book.
Occasionally pungent in its dialogue, the novel lapses too often into a vague, faux-poetic style that fails its subject and turns Shames, as she writes of one of her characters, into "one more itinerant writer picking through the wreckage of the Jewish experience for a measly sliver of truth."
Donna Rifkind is a former literary agent and magazine editor whose writing has been published by Commentary, the American Scholar, the New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post and The New York Times.