Summer Reading

BICYCLE DAYS

by John Burnham Schwartz

Summit; 253 pages; $18.95

Absent father. Melancholy mom. Squall-free adolescence followed by the ritual college degree. But with no draft to face -- no obligations at all, really -- how is a bright, sensitive, well-off young fellow to grow up? Honoring tradition, Alec Stern decides to go abroad to try out maturity. His destination: Tokyo. Bicycle Days, a first novel by a 24-year-old Harvard graduate, is the wry, rueful story of Alec's efforts to cope with his job at a computer outfit and with a vexing foreign culture. Through his adoptive family, the friendship of an old fisherman and a troubling affair with an older woman, he succeeds in learning some humbling lessons. Of course that means turning west, to face life at home. Like his hero, Schwartz avails himself of no shortcuts. Innocent of slickness or lit-crit smarts, his novel has authority and a refreshing flinty charm.

NO RESTING PLACE

by William Humphrey

Delacorte; 249 pages; $18.95

By the 1830s, the prosperous Cherokee farmers of North Carolina and Georgia had leaders educated in white universities and a written constitution recognized by the U.S. But they stood in the way of white expansion, so they were driven from their homes and herded along what came to be called the Trail of Tears to the Oklahoma territory. There, Humphrey's tale has it, the survivors were forced once more to migrate. The weight of such history would seem almost too oppressive for fiction to handle. But Humphrey skillfully balances the misery with the detachment of ancient family legend. The tale descends from a boy named Amos Ferguson, blue-eyed, a doctor's son, and a Cherokee. He survives the migration but, to save himself, lives out his life as a white Texan, the foster son of his father's murderer. Humphrey frames his story with intelligence and compassion, and the result is superb.

THE FLOATING WORLD

by Cynthia Kadohata

Viking; 196 pages; $17.95

The Japanese word ukiyo -- "the floating world" -- suggests the narrow bridges of Hiroshige or the frozen waves of Hokusai. In Kadohata's novel of the '60s, a Japanese American redefines ukiyo as the Western U.S., a place of "gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains." Kadohata has a painter's eye, and her narrator's scroll is filled with scrupulously detailed portraits -- of her tyrannical grandmother, of herself and her lovers and, memorably, of unassimilated migrant workers, like "animals migrating across a field . . . moving from the hard life just past to the life, maybe harder, to come."

THE HOUSE OF STAIRS

by Barbara Vine

Harmony Books; 277 pages; $18.95

When the prolific Ruth Rendell, who was already the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world, launched a second byline, Barbara Vine, she "actually stepped her writing up a level," in the envious phrase of fellow novelist Simon Brett. Plenty of peers agreed. The first Vine offering, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won a 1986 Edgar award as the best mystery published in the U.S. The second, A Fatal Inversion, in 1987 won Britain's equivalent, the Gold Dagger. With the third, The House of Stairs, a pattern emerges: each Vine book centers on women, each focuses on the aftermath of a crime committed among intimates, and each is more interested in inner mysteries of guilt and dread than a hunt for clues and suspects. The books also share Rendell's trademark candor about sexual obsession as a terrifying force of nature. In Stairs, an aunt and a niece fall urgently in love with, respectively, a young man and his alleged sister, with murder in some ways the least of the ensuing betrayals. Of all the horrors depicted, none, characteristically , is quite so frightening as the vulnerability of love.

STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW

by Ben Okri

Viking; 194 pages; $17.95

He saw floating items of sacrifice: loaves of bread in polythene wrappings, gourds of food, Coca-Cola cans. When he looked at the canoes again they had changed into the shapes of swollen dead animals. He saw outdated currencies on the riverbank." This is the Nigeria of Stars of the New Curfew, a violently shifting land of oppressors and victims. It would take a prodigious talent to convey the surrealism of daily life there. It would take, in fact, Ben Okri, a London-based Nigerian who illuminates his native country in a series of brilliant, angry tales. A skyscraper throws its shadow on impoverished huts. Hopeless men smoke marijuana "from the governor's secret farms." The head of state burbles "about austerity, about tightening the national belt, and about a great future. He sounded very lonely, as though he were talking in a vast and empty room." The room is Africa, immense and sad but not empty -- not so long as there is a writer like Okri to convey its tragedy in his unique and grieving works.

SORT OF RICH

by James Wilcox

Harper & Row; 278 pages; $17.95

Life in her wealthy new husband's Louisiana home isn't turning out the way Gretchen Dambar wants. But it isn't her fault -- or so the infuriating heroine of Wilcox's fourth novel wants to think. In fact, nothing is as she would have it. She is stung that no one in the bayou is impressed by her favorite cousin, one of New York City's most eligible bachelors. Her husband, so good in bed, has such bad taste in furniture. She says she doesn't care about money, but she does. Willing everything otherwise, Gretchen begins to see plots all around her and stumbles through a tragicomedy of errors before a capriciously cast-off confidante, as well as the very inanity of her dilemmas, shakes some sense into her. Sort of Rich is an exceedingly well-crafted tale of blind spots and self-delusions, alternately hilarious and sobering, in which dogs are seen as cats, friends as foes, strangers as lovers.

TALKING GOD

by Tony Hillerman

Harper & Row; 239 pages; $17.95

Tony Hillerman's thrillers are usually painstaking, almost anthropological efforts to plunge into the folkways and mind-sets of Native Americans, primarily Navajos. The crimes and solutions nearly always center on the clash of cultures, indeed of metaphysics, in the sparsely populated badlands of the Southwest. But Hillerman's latest is something of a departure. Much of Talking God takes place in official Washington; its characters include a quirky contract killer seemingly borrowed from Elmore Leonard; and the underlying politics focuses as much on Pinochet's Chile as on the grievances of tribes whose ancestral graves are plundered for museum displays. But the deftly manipulated plot reunites Hillerman's detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, lovelorn men who bury grief in stubborn pursuit of moral order. Their tracking skills and non-Anglo reasoning still prove vital to averting further crime. In place of breathtaking evocations of light and landscape, Hillerman touchingly portrays the outdoorsmen's dislocation amid subways, crowds and unneighborly indifference.

THE OXFORD BOOK OF IRISH SHORT STORIES Edited by William Trevor

Oxford; 567 pages; $24.95

Readers usually get their first impression of anthologies from high school or college English classes; the assigned texts are there to be studied, not enjoyed. But of course many collections can be read with pleasure, as this one engagingly demonstrates. William Trevor, the distinguished Irish novelist and short story writer, understands his compatriots' love of tale telling, the anecdotal impulse that flourishes among people who savor the spoken word. In his brief, informative introduction, he notes, "English fiction writers tend to state that their short stories are leavings from their novels. In Ireland I have heard it put the other way around."

The 46 stories Trevor selects stretch from the distant past to the here and now, although the emphasis falls decidedly on 20th century works. Thus some brief tales translated from the original Gaelic lead to a succession of pieces by well-known names (Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde) and then to such acknowledged modern masterpieces as James Joyce's The Dead and Frank O'Connor's The Majesty of the Law. The familiar mixes easily with material less so: William Carleton's eerie The Death of a Devotee, Bernard Mac Laverty's grim Life Drawing. All this diversity is held together by a common trait, an irresistible claim on attention, the written equivalent of a tug at the lapel or a hand on the shoulder. This book can be picked up and put down many times, but hardly ever in the middle of a story.

THE WAITING ROOM

by Mary Morris

Doubleday; 273 pages; $17.95

Zoe Coleman, her mother and grandmother have filled time's crevices with waiting -- for a man to return, a new life to begin or an old one to end, for love to be reborn. The time is 1972, and a crisis has brought Zoe to her Wisconsin hometown. Avoiding the draft, her brother had fled to Canada; now he is a drug addict in a local mental hospital. Through him Zoe reawakens from the arid existence of the once loved; recapturing a tender moment they shared as children brings redemption. She learns that "love isn't something you wait for. It's something you do." The novel has echoes of faddish self-help themes, but by interweaving the stories and dreams of three willful women, Morris offers a comforting truth about families. We build our memories inside the memories of others, and what they remember can take root in us as well.