Why our town existed, no one knew; how it had started, no one remembered." From such inauspicious beginnings comes the story of Miriam, the teen-age narrator of Your Mouth Is Lovely, (Ecco, 368 pages, $25.95), Nancy Richler's second novel. Set in a woebegone shtetl on the edge of a swamp in pre-revolutionary Russia, the book begins with Miriam's birth to an emotionally disturbed mother who drowns herself the very next day.
Little Miriam is raised by her sharp-tongued stepmother, Tsila, a skilled dressmaker who yearns to escape the backwardness and poverty of their marshy village.
As Miriam comes of age, the fires of anti-Semitic hatred and revolutionary fervor edge closer and closer to her village. Narrowly avoiding several nearby pogroms, she runs off to Kiev, where she becomes involved with a group of Socialist agitators, is quickly arrested and sent to a Siberian prison.
Richler's novel is scrupulously researched and teeming with details of shtetl life and folkways, faltering only in the rather tired, unimaginative sloganeering of its young revolutionaries. Her book's title comes from a prayer that Jewish mothers say when their children speak their first words, beseeching God that their children's utterances might always merit the gift of speech. "Your mouth is lovely," they tell their children, and one might say the same about the source of this writer's voice.
Ludmila Ulitskaya was trained as a geneticist in her native Russia, but was stripped of her scientific credentials in the 1970s for translating a banned novel, Leon Uris' Exodus. Thereafter she turned to writing, becoming one of Russia's most celebrated contemporary novelists. Until now only one of her books, a satirical portrait of Russian emigres called The Funeral Party, has been translated into English.
This month, another of her novels, first published in Russia in 1998, becomes available to American readers. Nimbly translated by Arch Tait, Medea and Her Children (Schocken, 320 pages, $24) boasts a remarkably large cast of characters wandering through many eras of complex pre-and post-Soviet history.
At the center of Ulitskaya's novel is the widow Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, descendant of a Greek family who settled centuries ago on the shores of the Crimean Sea. Medea's husband was a "jolly Jewish dentist" who became one of the first Communist Party members in Russia and died of cancer in the early 1950s, leaving her childless.
Since then, however, Medea's charming old house on the rocky coast has become a summer holiday destination for countless friends and family members, including a circus performer turned sports-medicine specialist who becomes the lover of two of Medea's nieces; a geologist nephew named Georgii; and various husbands of young relatives including a Korean linguistics genius and a Jewish mathematics whiz. Medea herself is a vague touchstone, her memories discursive and jumbled, but none of the stories here fails to fascinate.
For decades now, the group of British aesthetes known as the Bloomsbury set has been the McDonald's of the literary world, a franchise for whom both writers and readers seem to have a limitless appetite. The latest Bloomsbury book is Hong Ying's K: The Art of Love (Marion Boyars, 262 pages, $14.95), translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman and Henry Zhao.
The novel is based on the true story of the love affair between Julian Bell -- who was the son of Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell and the nephew of Virginia Woolf -- and a married Chinese intellectual named Ling Shuhua (called Lin Cheng in the novel). Touted by its publishers for its sexual explicitness, Hong Ying's novel has incited the daughter of Ling Shuhua to bring charges against the author in China for damaging the reputation of her dead mother.
If only the novel itself lived up to these titillations. It is instead an entirely shopworn affair. Despite its exotic milieu -- the university town of Wuhan in the mid-1930s -- and the attractiveness of the young protagonists, the book has trouble transcending its mechanical plot and ungainly translation to reach the erotic heights for which it aims. "He was no longer a liberal intellectual born of Bloomsbury, nor Professor Bell, nor even an Englishman, but pure yang in union with yin," labors Hong in a typical passage. It's enough to make one yearn for Victorian prudishness.
Anyone who claims that sentimental novels are incapable of delivering satisfaction has not paid sufficient attention to the many books of Southern writer Michael Malone. The Last Noel (Sourcebooks, 240 pages, $19.95), Malone's 11th novel, is an easy-reading, gimmicky and entirely affecting story about the doomed love between Noni Tilden, a rich white North Carolina girl, and Kaye King, an African-American boy who is the grandson of the Tilden family servants.
Each of the book's 12 chapters begins on a Christmas day during the pair's 30-year friendship, which begins around the time of the Kennedy assassination and fast-forwards right through the Challenger disaster and the AIDS crisis to the present. In the meantime, Kaye's career as a cardiac surgeon flourishes while his love for Noni remains unrequited, right up until her death from a brain tumor. While The Last Noel could not ever be called fresh or surprising, its benign and graceful storytelling, like the holiday season itself, has its own familiar comforts and pleasures.
The relationship between psychotherapy and literature is a strong and fruitful one, as anyone who has read Amy Bloom's fiction will attest. Lisa Gornick is a clinical psychologist whose first novel, A Private Sorcery (Algonquin, 384 pages, $23.95), also contains some powerful psychological profiling. A young Manhattan psychiatrist named Saul Dubinsky becomes addicted to drugs following a patient's suicide. Later implicated in a robbery scheme, he's jailed on criminal charges, leaving his wife and father to search their own psyches for the reasons Saul went bad. While Gornick's plot suffers from some implausibilities -- incuding a derailing subplot that sends the wife and father to Guatemala -- her sensitivity as she probes these characters' emotions is nothing short of exquisite.
If only one could say the same about Mary Robison, a longtime New Yorker short-story writer who weighs in this month with a new volume of 30 stories, all but four of them culled from three previous collections, titled Tell Me (Counterpoint, 240 pages, $14). Robison's characters have names like Bluey and Cake, and live in places like Terre Haute and Baltimore.
Less important than who or where they are, though, is Robison's habit of telling their flimsy stories as opaquely as possible, all the while hovering perilously on the brink of sense. Hers is the art of the non sequitur brought to a level of nearly Dadaist absurdity; it is a maddening kind of literary parsimoniousness posing as artistry.
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.