Every life has a defining moment, a point when a single choice changes everything that follows. It comes early in some lives, late in others. That one important choice is the theme that links the six novels reviewed below.
For 15-year-old Steven Parker, the character at the center of More Than Enough by John Fulton (Picador USA, 192 pages, $13), that moment is painful. When he and his sister take a walk into the nicer part of their Salt Lake City neighborhood, he is beaten by a gang of neighborhood kids because he's not Mormon.
His misfortune becomes a windfall for his impoverished family. The father of the boy who hurt Steven the most agrees to a large cash payment as restitution. But when the money runs out, the family's troubles begin in earnest. Steven and his younger sister are the casualties as his parents' marriage founders on the shoals of poverty and failed hopes.
Fulton cleverly uses the monochromatic Mormon society in this novel, against which the Parkers' collective oddity becomes a serious handicap. Steven's first-person narrative, rich with adolescent awkwardness and anger, hones the emotional edge of a family falling apart.
For the elderly Irishwoman who narrates Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry (Viking, 320 pages, $24.95), the defining moment takes a lifetime to find but ultimately brings peace. Annie Dunne has been left hunchbacked by polio in childhood ---and being unmarried and uneducated as well, has had to depend on the kindness of family and friends. It's an uncertain living at best, but 62-year-old Annie has landed finally in a place that seems safe, the rustic cottage of her cousin Sarah, also in her 60s.
Without running water or electricity, they live a rural and labor-heavy life that suits them both. (Modern housekeepers will be appalled in particular by the laundry, toilet and kill-it-yourself dinner arrangements.)
But the summer-long visit of Annie's grandniece and nephew, who are 10 and 5 respectively, brings first joy and then trouble. It's a relatively simple tale, but it's elevated into art by Barry's telling, which celebrates and mourns an Ireland nearly extinct. When Annie muses on how no one calls Sarah any more to lay out their dead with cloths and oil, it's an elegy in brogue for more than a corpse: "It is to do with the tarring of the roads, the demise of the traps, the death of things we knew in general. A gift like hers is no longer trusted, being a homemade thing. The shop-bought bread, the shop-bought medicine, it is all part and parcel of the same thing."
An equally rare part of American culture -- that of the cowboy rancher --is similarly mined in The Fruit of Stone by Mark Spragg (Riverhead Books, 304 pages, $24.95). For Wyoming cattleman B. McEban (Spragg builds a joke so good around his first name, not revealed until midway through the book, that I won't spoil it by naming him completely here), the defining moment is adultery with his best friend's wife, a woman he's loved since the three of them were teen-agers. It's a moment of gentleness in a world shaped by hard work and bad luck, and it doesn't last.
She leaves them both, and they go looking for her. At the end of the journey, McEban has lost two people he loved but found two more. Spragg's flinty prose shapes this story, told in a tripod format of past, present and dreams. His writing is often adjective-heavy and mannered. But the reader willing to wade through the chunks of description is rewarded with a nicely nuanced story.
Description is occasionally a saving grace in The Wasties by Frederick Reuss (Pantheon Books, 224 pages, $23). Unfortunately, there's not enough grace to lift this heavy-handed attempt out of the mire of trying too hard.
English professor Michael Taylor has a degenerative disease that he never names for the reader, preferring to call it by the novel's title. It's wrecking his life, not surprisingly, and that of his wife, because he can't talk. When the novel opens, he uses pad and paper and computer to communicate. But as the disease progresses, he shuts down and descends first into a semi-hallucinatory state and then into infancy.
There are a couple of genius moments here, particularly a scene where he goes with his nurse into Central Park and everyone looks like a fruit or a vegetable: "A tall thin carrot of a woman, as organic as anything cultivated by hand can be, came toward us pushing a stroller. You knew just by looking that she was destined to be julienned or grated and served atop a bed of leafy greens more sumptuous to look at than ever actually to eat. And the raspberry in the stroller, all lumps and straining juices, an adored ornament that would go out of her life too soon to be of any real help in it."
Reuss uses a lot of these flights of fancy. Unfortunately, most of the others are too long and too labored. Taylor's insistence that everyone he encounters is someone famous, usually a dead literary figure, is just one example. The jokes and the clumsy literary symbolism pile up and up, and in the end it's impossible to care about Taylor and his total degeneration. Instead, it just feels like a bad joke that's taken too long to tell.
The final two novels are fatally flawed, the work of authors apparently cursed with a tin ear. It's too bad, because they could have been culturally rich and interesting had their creators exercised even a modest amount of skill.
Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto (Grove Press, 144 pages, $22) tells the story of two cousins in a Japanese seaside resort. Tsugumi has had a serious (and unidentified) medical condition since childhood. Her doting family has spoiled her into a most disagreeable state; she is rude and thoughtless, sometimes cruel, particularly to her cousin Maria.
But over the course of a milestone summer, Maria comes to appreciate Tsugumi's courage. This is a remarkable achievement, not because she's sick and unpleasant, but because Tsugumi talks like a cross between Jimmy Cagney and a Valley Girl. The novel alternates inexcusably terrible conversations with overly precious explanatory passages. The result is not worth the effort required to read it.
There are also dialogue problems in Leslie by Omar Tyree (Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $21), but the trouble doesn't end there. The story of four black college girls in New Orleans, one of whom discovers she has supernatural powers, is told through dialogue so needlessly profane and piled with racial epithets that it cannot be reproduced in this newspaper. Paired with a story line that uses one cultural cliche after another -- voodoo is a typical example -- and an unlikely series of fantastic occurrences to move along a very predictable plot, the result is shoddy and unsatisfying.
Dail Willis, a former reporter and editor at The Sun, lives in Charlottesville, Va. Her reviews have been published by the Associated Press, the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers, as well as The Sun.