Memoirs are tricky things these days. We’ve been conditioned as readers to want a real-life story that is mind-blowing and unbelievable. But unfortunately, unbelievable tends to teeter dangerously close to actually unbelievable (see: J. T. Leroy, James Frey), leaving more trustworthy reality-chroniclers a tough road to tread. Daniel Asa Rose seemingly had an amazing story drop into his lap—as stated in his very long subtitle, his estranged cousin Larry reached out to him after years of silence to ask for his assistance in going to China to look for a kidney to save his life. Mr. Rose, an accomplished writer who previously wrote another memoir, 2002’s Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family’s Escape from the Holocaust, and who had been to China a couple of decades earlier, was the perfect man for the job. (Is it overly cynical to wonder just how much his inner-memoirist cheered when this situation presented itself?)

Mr. Rose is a skillful and funny writer, especially when handling absurd situations. And there were plenty of those to be had, not to mention no lack of colorful characters, including a mail-order would-be bride; a beautiful, selfless young Chinese woman; doctors of dubious intent; and, of course, the reason for the trip, Mr. Rose’s cousin. Larry is an old-fashioned tough-guy, with perhaps shadowy ties to somewhat unsavory characters (there is much discussion on a fatwa he put on another family member) and a speech impediment due to a botched operation on his tonsils. Mr. Rose chooses continuously to write out his speech defect—the first line of the book starts with him calling the author and greeting him with “Huwwo”—as well as various Chinese mispronunciations or bungling of English idioms. This is either humorous or irritating, depending on the reader (for us it was the latter), but it was a decision Mr. Rose explains in his Author’s Note: “Although it has traditionally been considered condescending to write in dialect, the climate seems to be changing—and for good reason. …. Tracking both how foreigners use the English language and how an American visitor scrambles to make sense of foreign sounds is here meant to transmit the spirit of modern travel—equal parts charming and alarming.”

Some may bristle at the idea of an American illegally trying to procure an organ abroad rather than wait on a domestic waiting list. Mr. Rose is sensitive to this, but  he also takes pains to explain not only the dire situation his relative was in at the time, but also the kinks in the system here in the U.S. His portrait of a modern-day China is fascinating, and so too are the somewhat ludicrous situations he and Larry find themselves in. One can’t help wondering about how Mr. Rose’s wife felt reading about his chaste-yet-charged relationship with Jade, a young woman who assists along the way and with whom he enters into a Lost in Translation–like relationship. But they never did karaoke, so it was probably O.K.

Sara Vilkomerson is a reporter at The Observer. She can be reached at svilkomerson@observer.com.

Well, whether or not Will's patients are consumed by sex, Kathryn Harrison's research into the subject continues unabated. Eight years after she set off shock wavelets with her autobiographical description of father-daughter incest in The Kiss, Ms. Harrison resumes the succulent munching of forbidden fruit in her new novel, Envy. Quadruple betrayal sounds like a surgical procedure; in fact, it's the stuff of a rich and complex summer read.

It begins, innocently enough, when mild-mannered psychotherapist Will ("I over-analyze when I'm threatened") Moreland trots off to his college reunion (Cornell, Class of '79), where he badgers an old flame about whether he might be the father of her daughter. Back in the office, he feels himself more than ever subject to "lust attacks" that are as random as they are virulent. This being a Kathryn Harrison novel-where sex is never just sex-we're invited to explore the deeper thing it stands for. Is it "a manifestation of his guilt over [his son] Luke's drowning and his desire to be punished, revealed as a danger, humiliated by his peers"? Or "an escape route from his hyper-intellectualizing everything"? Or an assault on his rather opaque wife's unavailability?

Enter a new patient whose man-eating sexuality puts all to the test. That the youthful seducer is not well manicured but a nail-biter with "gnawed strawberry hulls" only adds to her allure: In conjunction with her stained coat and unkempt hair, it gives her sexuality an unexpectedly squalid, self-devouring edge, especially when Will gets close enough to see that her nails are "bitten to the point of injury" so that her fingertips seem less chewed than "burned by corrupt explorations."

Who could compete with this? Certainly not the women at the health club, who are "clothed by [their] musculature" so that they're "not naked. Not really. Their clothes are off, but they've created a kind of uniform out of their bodies. They're so aggressively trained and toned that they've conformed to an established, standard shape." Young Jennifer's heat is way hotter.

Before you can say "counter-transference," patient has therapist on his back in the steamiest female-on-male rape scene since …. Well, put it this way: After reading it, I felt guilty and chastened both, as though I'd not only cheated on my wife but gotten my comeuppance, too. Mind what beach you read this on.

But Ms. Harrison has only begun to toy with us. To avoid giving anything away, let's just say she maneuvers us into the same boat she was steering when she wrote The Kiss. Because we get no warning, we feel as implicated as Will does, and in a similar state of shock: "What he's done-what he may have done-reduces adultery, only this morning a significant sin, almost to a marital misdemeanor."

Envy is rife with the manipulations of a fiendish plot-weaver. It's not so easy for the reader to cluck disapproval after Ms. Harrison has seduced us along with her protagonist, condemning us to "a sickening emotional arc"-"from horror to anger to shame and then back." Not many writers have the guts or the gift to take us on this Tilt-a-Whirl of illicit sexual emotions, making the unspeakable not only speakable but entirely plausible.

Will has an estranged twin brother, a half-sympathetic, half-diabolical character who has taken refuge from a facial stain (a "livid splash of purple" that gives him the yin-yang appearance of a superhero) by developing himself into an Olympic swimmer. Stung by a lifetime's injustice of facing "an ideal version of himself" across the playground and dining-room table, it turns out that this "spectral celebrity" has taken liberties, shall we say, with the women in Will's past, including Will's wife-the night before the wedding. Was it "an act of hatred? Of desperation? Would it even be possible to parse out one from the other?"

And then it gets better. I mean, worse. Faced with his newfound knowledge, Will can't think straight: "Thoughts don't proceed in logical argument; they ricochet around inside his skull, cracking into one another like pinballs and destroying every coherent mental construction in their path." (It's billiard balls, not pinballs, that crack into one another; Will is so addled that his author can't distinguish pinball from pool.) Ms. Harrison has hit upon something more biblically abhorrent even than incest: She's discovered brotherly betrayal, an archetypal transgression intimately associated with the word blazoned on the cover of this novel. "Envy" touches the nerve that drives Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Will and his cold-blooded fish of a brother. They're all at swim in an Olympic-sized pool of sin, and such is the tidal force of this novel that we're right in there, dog-paddling with them.

This is a fast read, but beneath the surface excitement, the core issues of trust and betrayal stand up well to close scrutiny. The characters rehash events, not in a Rashomon-like way so that new information is added with each retelling, but merely to chew the information over and over and thereby normalize it. This too is part of the author's gifted deviousness. Her language throughout is sensually cerebral: coffeemakers that brew "with a congested noise," love that is like water in "assuming the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it." Her use of exclamation marks instead of question marks-"Revenge! For what! Revenge for what!"-makes for a maddened kind of utterance that nails the state of mind wherein a character knows but can't accept the answer. She captures the cadences of domestic turbulence better than Edward Albee ever did, not only the physical descriptors (one character seeks the most terrible truths "with her face in her hands, the way someone might cradle an aching jaw") but also in the breathless manner her characters cut each other off-overlap-interrupt-circle back. The dash never has it so good as when Kathryn Harrison sits down to type.

It goes without saying, of course, that she has boundary issues. None of her characters have ever heard of the concept of T.M.I. (too much information). Do real-life fathers talk about whom they're "boffing" with their offspring, or ask them if an extramarital kiss entailed tongue? Borderline inappropriateness is a given in a book by Ms. Harrison, and it's alarming how quickly we get used to it. We're not jarred when Will tells his dad that he gets a "physical response" to his female patients or acknowledges that during a hug, he's "keenly conscious of his father's body and the comfort it offered him." We scarcely blink when, in return, father tells son that his latest affair has inspired him to "upgrade [his] underwear" and confesses that he can't always "muster [himself] for the job at hand."

The question is: Do we accept all this because, after 10 psyche-shattering books, Ms. Harrison has debauched us by now? Or is it because we recognize that she's communicating something important? Here's what she's telling us, in book after book, and it's why we forgive and even celebrate her, lurid trappings and all: Our strengths are always our undoing, and to be quintessentially human is to be "intelligent, but not enough to understand; awake, but not enough to be entirely conscious. Filled with love, but not enough to overcome fear. Made in the image of God, perhaps, but, if so, like a fifth-generation photocopy, or the fax of a fax of a fax, so that even the outline is approximate."

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she

was horrid.

I present this Longfellow verselet by way of asserting that Nicole Krauss can be very good indeed, and occasionally horrid-the horridness stemming from the forgivable sin of overweening literary ambition. Hence the overweening title of her latest, The History of Love. (Gee, nothing more?)

You'd think, from the way some reviewers have jumped on Ms. Kraus and her superstar bridegroom, Jonathan Safran Foer, who came out with his second novel just before she came out with hers, that the duo had murdered Mother Goose in her sleep. (Granted, the press may well have a permanent case of poet envy, and piling on is the closest some critics get to physical exercise.)

To set the record straight-or at least exfoliate the discussion somewhat-let us stipulate that Mr. Foer is not Ms. Krauss' only influence. She had a well-received literary career underway with her first novel, Man Walks into a Room (2002), before marrying Mr. Foer. To offset the charge that she's too much in the orbit of her husband (a charge, it must be said, the twosome did little to discourage by cross-echoing each other in their new books), I offer traces of the following influences (take a deep breath):

Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Bob Dylan, Ingmar Bergman, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez ("She roamed the house in a kimono printed with red flowers, and wherever she went a trail of crumbled pages followed"); children's books like Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree and Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ("It was turning out to be a bad day" is a paragraph in itself); the oh-so-hummable cadences of Fiddler on the Roof ("it dawned on him that, miracle of miracles, this lovely girl might actually be developing feelings for him"); sundry nursery rhymes ("one shoe on, one off"); and the romantic film comedies of the early 90's (especially Sleepless in Seattle and Milk Money, which featured cloyingly precocious children micromanaging their parents' love lives-a popular trope in American movies when Ms. Krauss was in her apparently impressionable late teens).

So it ain't just her hubby.

(As for the hubby himself, whose new novel has been so vilified that he recently said he feels like "the most hated writer in America," I believe that the eminence responsible for inspiring his most successful character-the Ukrainian translator Alex in Everything Is Illuminated-is none other than Ali G's Kazakhstan import, Borat. "Che' it out," as Mr. G might say: The dates are right.)

In truth, given the rich and varied flavors of her forebears, I find it nearly impossible to be anything but divided on the subject of Ms. Krauss. On the one hand, I'm stunned by the sweep of her lyricism … but I'm bugged by the twee. I'm moved by her romantic vision, by turns muted and glowing (Winona Ryder, call your agent) … but I don't believe for a moment that the universe she's conjuring is our own. I'm slain by the mini-fables she strings prettily together … but irked by the moments of fake and clotted humility ("I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is"). Humility is not this writer's game.

It's frankly painful to see her talent marred by pretense. Her use of subtitles, for instance, is raw gimmickry: "THE DEAD SEA IS THE LOWEST PLACE ON EARTH"-a sub-chapter in its entirety-and "HOW TO RESTORE A HEARTBEAT" strike me as not so much sophomoric as a confused attempt to impress grown-ups. Is a line like "Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering" kind of wonderful, or kind of yucky? (Maybe it depends on whether you thought Elvira Madigan-the makeout film that was popular when I was an impressionable teen-was highbrow or hogwash.) Can it be that she's both precocious and pretentious at the same time, poetical and posturing? And what about her annoying habit of putting periods after short declaratives like "but" or "and yet?" It's hard not to think of this as anything but. Attention-seeking.

Then there's her thing for sadness. Let me count the ways: "The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad." "Deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences." "Sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love." "Sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body." "The sadness of gravity." "There are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."

This sort of exalted gloom can only be called Weltzschmerz, a condition that for good reason usually afflicts only the very young (say, the age that enjoys Milk Money). It's what's both good and less good about Ms. Krauss-good when it feels bona fide, less so when it feels forced, especially in conjunction with such contrivances as this: "my Alma should grow up to be blessed with health and happiness and what would be so terrible some nice breasts."

Nicole Krauss may be one of those writers, like her husband, whose stock goes up and down depending not so much on the written text as on the reader's mood-seeming false one minute, poignant the next, depending on where you hang in your digestion cycle. Which makes her a very personal writer. There's not a lot of humor here (she puts a high price tag on herself, which is absolutely her right), and the whole is touched with a solemnity that you'll find either moving or mannered, or a mix of the two. Maybe, as a character in The History of Love postulates, some people "just get happier and happier everyday. And some people … just get sadder and sadder"-and reading the exasperatingly talented Ms. Krauss, we get both.

What I say is this: Let's back off and give the curl room to grow out. If Ms. Krauss and her husband are guilty of anything, it's sumptuousness of ambition, enormousness of heart. They want nothing less than to record the condition of human love. Genuine heartbreak for the world cements their work. They may just produce novels of surpassing beauty … if we don't poison them first.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Yo, prep-school papa! You with the gray hair and rueful smile, dropping your little bundle of neuroses off at her boarding school after the long Christmas break. You think no one was watching? You think no one saw how you jumped on the cell to your mistress before you were even down the cobblestone drive? Think again. Could be that a gimlet-eyed novelist posing as a 14-year-old student was checking out your every move.

Not that parents are the only ones who land under the feverishly microscopic lens of Curtis Sittenfeld, now all grown up, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of a big-buzz debut novel, Prep. Also in her sights is a newbie teacher who comes in for a compassionate drubbing because she has the misfortune to sport a frumpy accessory. An overweight classmate falls into empathetic disfavor not because of the extra poundage, but because she feels more secure than she has a right to. The smirkiness of another classmate is kindly judged to be only skin-deep: Her smugness was "like the earth's crust; once you got below it, she was strangely innocent."

Clearly, the narrator of Prep is incapable of missing a trick. Fresh from Nowhere Indiana, trying desperately to blend into the woodwork of her exclusive Massachusetts boarding school, Lee Fiora is the last person you'd expect to be able to see through appearances. (In real life, the author hails from Cincinnati-which makes sense. Ever notice how Ohio girls are the ones most enamored of the East Coast? Victims of the so-near-yet-so-far syndrome.) Unwealthy, awkward, obsessively attuned, Lee is inexperienced with taxis, can't pronounce "Greenwich," doesn't know Bob Dylan from Bob Marley; she's a Hoosier hick whose dad wears mismatched khakis (and is the more pitifully lovable for it). But it's precisely because she's a fish out of water that she's so keenly perceptive. As another writer from the provinces, John Updike, once said of his early stint writing "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker, who else but someone from the sticks would come up with the freshest, most urbane vignettes?

So it's a coming-of-age story as we watch Lee come to terms-or, more accurately, as she watches herself, with at least as much of the unsparing honesty she trains on her peers. At first we're impatient with how young it all is-must we be subjected to the unchallenging observations of a freshman who believes boys have an easier time being happy than girls?-but soon enough we're charmed by her trials. Intimidated by people with august middle names, lacking the "animal intuition" of her mates to play Madonna with the speakers facing out toward the courtyard-to be, in a word, cool-she suffers a loneliness that's almost magical: She believes that if her woe is intense enough, it will "magnetically draw a handsome boy to her room to comfort [her]." Of course, what comforts us is our understanding that her sense of inadequacy bodes well for her future-that it's a gift which will someday lead her to write the hard-won book we hold in our hands.

But not yet. First Lee has to work her way through that peculiar mix of distrust and disorientation that is the teenage outcast's lot. Rarely has the purgatory of prep-school privilege been spelled out in such excruciating, subtle detail. Because she lacks the most cherished of high-school attributes-the instinct to be breezy-Lee constantly questions her place in the world. She learns that fitting in is a more complicated matter than merely laughing at jokes she doesn't find funny ("it was an act of aggression not to"). Like an iceberg, 90 percent of her thought process is not visible to outsiders; unlike an iceberg, she's surprisingly warm to the touch.

Which brings us to boys. Ah, boys. It goes without saying that Lee is so clueless about the opposition-teenage boys who seem predatory one minute and tender the next-that she longs for the humblest sign of acceptance, even if it's only the "almost compliment" of having a guy call her by her last name. By her lights, she excels only at falling short, in algebra as in her love life, so that the very idea of sex leaves her "almost terrified, with hope."

All the better, then, when sex of a sort arrives and is subjected to the same rigorous examination as everything else. Her first kiss "was harder work than I had imagined, and less immediately pleasing. In fact, it felt intriguing more than enjoyable-the shifting, overlapping wet and dry parts of our mouths and faces, the mild sourness of his mouth … and also the way it was hard not to be conscious of the moment as it happened, not to want to pause and acknowledge it, even if only by laughing. I didn't find kissing funny, but it didn't seem that serious, either, not as serious as we were acting like it was."

Fast-forward to a blowjob. (Well, she does.) Surely Lee isn't the first preppie to suggest that the discomfort of giving one confers "a sort of nobility-a kinship with all the girls who'd done this before." But she may be the first to admit to "an affection for myself for being willing to do it." It's one of the reasons we come to be so fond of Lee and, by extension, Ms. Sittenfeld.

(Have I been getting the two mixed up? Blame the publisher, who made the questionable decision to send out press materials that feature photos of Ms. Sittenfeld's real-life Groton School junior class, and even of her heartthrob-presumably the recipient of her oral largesse.)

Throughout Prep, everyday schoolgirl angst gets a makeover from the setting: The stained-glass windows of chapel lend a "tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness." And compassion works its soft-touch magic: To win favor, Lee rather pathetically gives her classmates complimentary haircuts and finds herself acutely conscious of how "warm and vulnerable" their oblivious heads feel; she struggles all through the novel to feel for them a "true and continuous sympathy instead of mere intermittent pangs." So it's with regret that we wonder why Ms. Sittenfeld ultimately allows her narrator to buy into the snobbery that torments her, first by cruelly giving a potential suitor the back of her hand simply because he is "LMC" (lower middle class-part of the kitchen staff), and finally by learning to regard everyone back in South Bend with disdain (they "were fat, or wore brown ties, or seemed to be in bad moods)." Are we supposed to cheer when she's at last achieved this level of priggishness?

In the end, Lee is liberated by graduation and the realization that the pond is a lot bigger than it's been for the past four years. But she's sad, too-and so are we. Perhaps it's the knowledge that the pond is not all that much bigger, that life in the wide world is in many ways prep school writ large, and that she'll need every one of the protective talents she's honed-not just for the near future, but for the rest of her life, as well. In which case, may I be permitted an upperclassmen's well-meaning word of advice? Keep the gimlet eye, kiddo, but lose the snobbery. With heart and talent like yours, it's beneath you.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

The secret to Annie Proulx's latest collection of down-home Wyoming stories is hidden in plain sight: "In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society's pull."

She's being modest, but to a certain extent she's right: There isn't that much more to it than being gap-toothedly picturesque. Grandmothers with names like Vivian Stifle care more for their chickens than their children. Over-the-hill cowhands sport barbed wire as hat bands in their Stetsons. Young and old alike who make it a point of pride "to quit whenever and whatever needs quitting" are forever tripping on the belts of their bathrobes and cracking their heads on rickety cellar steps. With this kind of colorful ambiance, who needs to build character?

It may sound ungrateful to say, but so much gunsmoke-and-mirrors atmosphere seems to have made Ms. Proulx a tad lazy in Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. With all this sure-fire surface entertainment ripe for the picking, she may figure, why spoil the fun by delving for depth?

Certainly there's loads of fun to be had. Ms. Proulx has a genius for faces: One is "like an arrowhead, eyes so pale a blue they looked turned inside out, and atop his lip a drizzly mustache"; another "contained enough material for two faces: a high brow, a long chin, wide cheekbones with fleshy cheeks like vehicle head-rests, and a nose like a plowshare." Lest you think it's only women she picks on, one rancher is "a thready blond in his forties with a round head and beaky orange nose that gave him the look of a seagull," while another has "coarse skin [that] seemed made of old leather upholstery, and instead of lips, a small seam opened and disclosed his cement-colored teeth."

Ms. Proulx also has a bone-deep gift for landscape, profoundly loving Wyoming with its "long sight lines and rearing mountains," which "crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow …. Distance reduced a herd of cattle to a handful of tossed cloves." It's a backdrop she knows expertly: Mending a fence, one cowhand has to "cast about for a stick or something to twist tight a diagonal cross-brace wire, but the only thing at hand was a cow's bleached leg bone with its useful trochlea head, which seemed made to jam fence wire tight." She's able to render it with a sure hand (one range is "so badly gnawed it resembled the surface of an antique billiard table in an attic heavily populated by moths") and a warmth contagious enough that we can smell it: the mud and the "mineral odor of wet rock."

She even has a theme with heft-namely the collision between the Old West and New. Scattered like flecks of gold throughout Bad Dirt are terse, antique natives who mourn the old Wyoming that existed before ranchers started wearing aftershave, before rivers were "faced with flattened junk cars to prevent erosion in the spring floods," before the gated clusters of 4,200-square-foot "timber castles" sprang up, featuring "a gargantuan living room, intricate log notches, the distant mountains fitted artfully into the vast window, against which birds broke their heads." These cowpoke McMansions are inhabited by jet-setters capable of appreciating the local pronghorn only insofar as "their coloration-reddish brown accented by sparkling white-reminded him of a pair of golf shoes he had once owned."

Wonderful, right? "At dusk a globe of light like an incandescent jellyfish … stained the mountainy darkness the weak orange of civilization." At dawn the security policemen patrolling the millionaire subdivisions practice making loon calls, now that the real loons have all disappeared. The local ranchers know something's wrong with their fat, sweaty children but can't say what, choosing instead to blame their unquenchable thirst on the over-salted chicken sold at fast-food joints. With laconic poetry, Ms. Proulx says they can no longer "tell the size of things." Gene Autry country it ain't, and probably never was: Between the droughts of yore and the Wal-Marts of today, Wyoming's marrow has been pretty much sucked dry … but it's meat for a writer like Mr. Proulx to sink her teeth into-especially when the truck stops sell lemon meringue that tastes like tartar sauce with sugar.

More's the pity, then, that Ms. Proulx allows herself to trivialize her own material. She takes too facile a pleasure in giving her characters cartoonish handles like Plato Bucklew, Ulysses Straw Bird, Fran Banghammer, Mercedes de Silhouette, Doctor Playfire and worse. I blush to report that a Reverend Pecker is referred to as "Reverend Pottymouth." The western twang is frequently of the hee-haw, clod-kicking variety that belies the author's high purpose (and belies as well her slightly forbidding, arms-crossed, high-school-wrassler-style author photo). Even granting the tradition of varmint-rustling Rockies vernacular, she takes too little care enlisting imagery that shoots for anything beyond the cheap laugh. (One cashier "disliked having to repeat 'Have a nice day' to people who deserved to be ridden bareback by the devil wearing can openers for spurs.")

Worse, most of these aren't tales so much as tidbits. Stories as slight and harmless as "The Trickle Down Effect" (which first appeared in The New Yorker) about a "good horsewoman" named Fiesta Punch who hires a drunk to haul hay from Wisconsin ("Westconston!") are little more than the sort of inspired drunkalogues you might hear at an A.A. meeting. A silly throwaway about a beard-growing contest (first published in The Virginia Quarterly Review) has the feel of something wisely left out of her first Wyoming collection five years ago. One (first published in Playboy), even has a caveat emptor tucked into its opening paragraph: "It's not much of a story, the kind of thing you might hear on a sluggish afternoon in Pee Wee's." But what if we readers don't want to waste the afternoon at the local saloon? What if we rely on the fiction editors of The New Yorker, Playboy, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Scribner to separate the wheat from the chaff for us, and not let Ms. Proulx coast on her hard-won reputation for penetrating, pitch-perfect fictions?

Though studded with genuine delights (and one fully realized story, "The Wamsutter Wolf," which restores our faith in editors: The Paris Review knew what fierce, frightening hilarity Ms. Proulx is capable of when she marinates a story long enough), most of these 11 pieces are patently stories in a minor key, little more than five-finger exercises. I'm reminded of what another truculent-appearing, arms-crossed author once had a character say about his own writing. In a story-within-a-story that Garp tossed off in The World According to Garp, John Irving had Garp acknowledge that he could have written it "with one hand tied behind his back." It's a testament to Ms. Proulx's prodigious talent elsewhere that we're forced to say the same thing here.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Does anyone know if the word "coquette" was in vogue in Canada in the 1940's? Because if it was, you can be sure that the gravely gifted and always interesting short-story writer Alice Munro, born in rural Ontario in 1931, didn't get through high school without hearing a lot of it aimed in her direction.

Or maybe not. Maybe she was one of those teens who funneled all her energy into the track team, or the literary magazine, steering clear of those classmates who indulged in the immemorial practice of leading suitors on. In either case, I mean no disrespect to the grand dame of New Yorker contributors; let me hasten to add (or not so hasteningly-let me say it leisurely, loiteringly, taking my sweet coquettish time), that I intend the term in the most flattering sense. A literary coquette, let us stipulate, is someone who-like Ms. Munro in her worthy but rather hysterically overpraised latest collection, Runaway-piques our interest early, backtracks to fill out the context, ambles around the edges of our patience, holds all in abeyance while tension mounts, and delivers the goods at a time and place of her own choosing, if at all.

So what is the literary coquette's M.O.? Typically, she (or he) specializes in a mouth-watering come-on-certain car passengers, say, are driving around in their pajamas at midnight-about which she tells us nothing more for many pages. The characters-sometimes as many as three or four in the opening paragraphs-all know more than the reader and won't let on while the story ambles along, dilating tantalizingly and only gradually looping back to take care (or not) of our desperate narrative needs.

The technique is deliberate, reliable and (God knows) time-tested. Some of the world's favorite literary coquettes-Stephen King being perhaps the crudest and most transparently manipulative-compute their suspense by degrees in order to leave us hanging. Unless we're prone to the literary equivalent of blue balls, hanging's not necessarily a bad thing, even if we admit that the impulse to write this way-to deny the reader vital information or a central secret-is essentially withholding when not downright passive-aggressive.

Ms. Munro holds back well. She opens one of the eight stories in this, her 11th collection, with a green-faced man near a tree "fruited with jewels"; not till we turn the page are we told we're inside a Chagall print. The starkly titled stories most often feature a solitary woman with something of a gypsy air (or at least a free-form country sensibility), likely to be traveling the Canadian countryside in search of someone's old summer house in a state of composed semi-bewilderment, fueled by nostalgia to which she will never quite surrender, half ruing the lost years, half comforted that they are gone. Oddly buoyed by "lack of hope-genuine, reasonable, and everlasting," she's also sustained by a sense of solidarity with other women, both "stricken with respect" for the older role models of her youth and assured that her sister-sufferers are the sterner sex: "Women have always got something, haven't they, to keep them going? That men haven't got."

Strict with herself, as befits the class tease, she is brave and stoical, even when her beloved daughter (in the devastating story "Silence") runs off to a spiritual retreat and, year after agonizing year, opts not to return. Stiffened by inner resources, she appears in one story (perhaps standing in for the strong-jawed and frumpy-hatted Ms. Munro herself?) as "beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner ... was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles."

Often lapsing into reminiscence, these splendid women-just beyond our fingertips!-are burdened by a sense of propriety so old-fashioned that one of them is reluctant to call a young doctor by his first name, while another declines to use the word "breast" to describe where Cleopatra's asp mortally bit her. Somewhat stunted by the limitations of their time and place ("She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in … everything from prayer wheels to High Mass"), most are concerned with nothing more earth-shaking than the business of marriage proposals-who is egging on whom, who gets turned down for the third time and who is marked for spinsterhood. (In this regard, it may be of interest to note that "Some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.")

All these details are delivered in the manner of a prom queen of yore dispensing her favors to the football captain while she hums the school anthem-dispassionately, almost with a sense of disavowal. "She recalled now how the sun was coming up behind them, how she looked at Clark's hands on the wheel, the dark hairs on his competent forearms, and breathed in the smell of the inside of the truck, a smell of oil and metal, tools and horse barns. The cold air of the fall morning blew in through the truck's rusted seams." And then, of course, there's the chasteness of the act itself: "The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming." Of actual congress, nary a word.

So what's it like for a coquette to be teased herself? Ms. Munro's characters seem to thrive on it, whether they're pining for an estranged daughter's return, in one story, or counting the days that separate them from a potential lover, in another. (Ardently touching her fingers to the name of her beloved's hometown on a map, "she might have touched the very place he was in" and becomes aware "of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings," making her "walk differently and smile for no reason." The yearning gives purpose to her existence, filling her with "tension and defiance, the risk of her life.") And when the unspeakable occurs-when word comes down that the daughter has produced five grandchildren that the mother has no hope of meeting, or when the man seems to turn his lover away without a word of explanation-their corseted natures do them proud: Ms. Munro's characters won't let themselves go. Women in Runaway are given to weeping offstage; afterward, we see only their reddened eyes.

In the end, her sufferance bequeaths Ms. Munro the long view, the ability to witness and anticipate how small towns change over time, how old houses heave and give up the ghost, how families morph and vengeances are wreaked and love sparks anew, sometimes from the very ashes that seemed to cool decades earlier. Call it the wisdom of the literary coquette. One after the other, these stories, saturated with grieving insight, leave us "outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame"-with endings that are as satisfyingly appropriate as they are goose-bumpingly unforgettable. And that's a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

A new aphorism for the over-30 set: Don't trust anyone who claims to be objective about experimental fiction. Subjectivity is part and parcel of the experience, and quite gloriously so, it seems to me. I cheerfully admit that a lot of what passes for experimentalism leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the leftover tang of my undergraduate tutelage at the hands of a famously provocative avant-gardist who was quoted, back in the day, on the first page of The New York Times Book Review claiming that "plot and character are the enemies of fiction." Heady stuff to the confused and impressionable 20-year-old under his wing, especially when head was more or less what the great man was doggedly trying to solicit from my girlfriend.

For this and other personal reasons, I've little patience for the 70's experimental heyday, which in retrospect seems less pretentiously pioneering than merely priapic. All that minimalist prose with maximalist ego, pared down in every department but the penis. Disguising clever mischief in gloomy garb hardly seems worth the bother. And it always felt emotionally stingy, thin gruel that left you feeling empty-bellied and vaguely defiled. So much noodling around, so little to show for itself, as if its proponents actually believed that twaddle about plot and character. How droll.

Which is why I'm pleased when an author makes me rethink my prejudice. Maybe it helps if it's a woman. Samantha Hunt's rookie novel, The Seas , reads as though Gordon Lish had undergone a magic-realist implant, John Hawkes had sprouted Marquezian wings, Raymond Carver had lived to see Prozac proliferate. She has some of their tics, for sure-but they're palatable when tinged with the fabulous.

At first glance, this tale, set in a dumpy northern seaport, about a downhearted chambermaid who believes she's a mermaid, flaunts much of experimentalism's creepier trademarks. Check: The studied countrified cadence-"He drank a lot, so did my grandparents, both sets of them, so does most everyone who lives this far north" (one suspects the cowpoke iambs didn't come by way of the corral but from some grim graduate writing program). Check: The grotesque is relished-Ms. Hunt goes on about a disembodied hand for the same reason a depressed person might: because it lends them a fleeting energy. In fact, depression is the obligatory prevailing mood, the faux bumpkin mopeyness designed to stamp out any ember of light-heartedness so effectively that everyone's despair feels forced (witness the character who "is not very old but her cigarettes help her to feel like she is"). Baudelaire may have cultivated his neuroses with "delight and terror," as he once claimed, but what's most often cultivated by writers of this ilk is middle-class ennui, their hothouse demons lovingly nurtured so they can have something-anything-to write about.

It's Twin Peaks meets Northern Exposure . Through the frigid air, we can almost hear the reverb of the soundtrack's bass notes. (Ominously plangent or merely irritating?)

The narrator-the mermaid manqué -lists quite a pedigree. She has eyes "no more colorful than ice with a little blue in there"; considers herself "the town's bad seed"; senses rot in everything she touches; gets called "retard" by stuttering classmates; and looks forward to further global warming so all the world's ugliness will be underwater. Mostly (check and checkmate) she has too much time on her hands-time enough to notice the way scuffed-up road sand "makes the rubber soles of my shoes vibrate in a way that runs a tickle up the inside of my leg." Isn't there a local aquarium or branch library where she could be a little constructive?

The supporting cast is suitably skanky. The townspeople suffer such nameless yearning dread that they are given to howling like wolves. Jude, the boyfriend (if he can be called that, since he's selected our narrator to be one of the few women in town he won't sleep with), sports "gill scars" on his chest and wrestles with memories of soldiering in Iraq, which stands for everything that is the opposite of this place: dry instead of wet, somewhere life and death are immutable instead of so damn porous all the time.

Geography itself functions as the main supporting player, beginning with the omnipresent ocean, which is variously described as "mean and beautiful," "full of everything except mercy," "a one-of-a-kind thing, like there is nothing else similar to it in the entire world and so the ocean feels no love, no mother, no father or husband, like … an extremely nasty and greedy thing, like an only child." The town it oppresses boasts the highest rate of alcoholism in the country, features dining rooms stacked with empty picture frames, toothbrushes so old they pre-date the narrator's birth, and kitchens that reek of "bacon fat [poured] on the carpet … just like it was a dirt floor."

Well, you might say, serves 'em right for carpeting their kitchens. And I wouldn't disagree with you. Except that this landscape-saving grace-is so superlatively dreary it makes fantasy inevitable. A street is capable of "dreaming it was the silver asphalt of fish scales." A grandfather, working as a typesetter in a press so noisy that the workers communicate by using plates of reverse-order letters to write notes to each other, woos his wife "in backwards words." Indeed, this old codger has a grand argument with words that approaches the magical. Perusing an outdated Russian-English dictionary one evening, he obsesses about the word razbliuto :

"We don't have a word to match it but we should," he says. "We should develop it tonight because the word means 'the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.'" After discarding "hate" and "betrayal," he considers "disamoured" and, with a smile, "evol." "[ Razbliuto ] is the little house love moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. The lover sees the old love moving and it looks like it's alive again."

Love indeed is the chief difference between Samantha Hunt and her literary forebears, who wouldn't touch the subject without that 10-foot pole called irony. Her narrator is not afraid to love deeply, exulting that she loves Jude so much she literally can't see straight, "in love so badly that it was affecting my vision." As she puts it, "I fell and fell and fell until I was so deep in love that love resembled a well, steep sides with no way out," working herself into such a lather that "some nights I want Jude so badly that I imagine I am giving birth to him." The watery result is that she tries to drown herself in the tub, before reducing her lover, literally, to a puddle.

It's this book's emotional expressiveness-generosity, by any other name-that ultimately breaks the mood's prescribed monotony and lofts it above its precursors. By the end, even the narrator's sadness is saved from one-dimensionality by insight into her condition, which adds up to a kind of wisdom. "When you are young … sadness can make you feel like you have something to do. Sadness can be like a political cause almost or a religion or a drug habit." Aspiring melancholics, as well as all experimental writers, should be forced to tape that line to their foreheads.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Confession: It's not Virginia Woolf I'm afraid of-it's Cynthia Ozick. Even though she blurbed my last book (disclosure, disclosure) and once recommended me for a fellowship I didn't get (thanks for the memories, Mr. Guggenheim), still I'm afraid of her. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.

And a little of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And a lot of that odd-duck dyad, Charlotte Brontë/Jane Austen-waif-like women who pack a wallop, whose impeccably mouse-like demeanors belie their blazing insights. Just when you resign yourself to the fact that they're as meek and timorous as they seem, powch! comes the originality of their vision, the flammability of their passion, the cunning of their wisdom. (Others find them bold from the get-go, I realize; I'm only talking about how their aura reads to me.)

But mostly Ms. Ozick reminds me of Emily Dickinson. A Jewish Emily Dickinson, two dainty birdlike poets with great swoops of language, sharp claws of syntax. Small, gentle, delicate women who veil themselves with such fluttering modesty as to blindside you to the enormous stern force of their words.

Which is why I experience a fit and proper trepidation about critiquing Ms. Ozick's latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World . You won't hear reviewers say this very often, but who am I to sit in judgment of my betters ? Even if I entertain certain reservations (her plot strikes me as oddly inert, while her exegesis of the Karaites-an ancient Jewish sect of scriptural literalists-would be better off in some other book, preferably not a novel), still I stand and bow before such royal imagery as the following, which describes a man who's aged since last seen: "His curly hair was dusted all over … as if a peculiar rime had grown over him, or out of him, like a coating of flour." And this, about a man laughing: "It altered him. Hidden creases, bursting into folds, corrugated the long slab of his jowl, and there, behind the contorted lips, like secret things exposed, were his big ruined teeth."

Sentence for sentence, her sense of place crackles with imperial, almost gleeful power. Here's a character in the 1930's coming up from the subway onto 42nd Street "into a flowing gully of striders, gray fedoras like a field of dandelions gone to seed, hurrying women stuttering on Chinese heels. A denatured autumn wind smelled of trolley ozone." Here's rundown upstate New York of the same vintage: "half decayed, with its dilapidated farms, barns and silos rotting, and in the towns tired frame houses with warped porches pleading for paint, town after town sluggish in the dazing summer glare, the business district-three streets lined with sickly stores darkened by canvas awnings-surrendered to exhaustion."

Even her throwaway lines have the incongruous firepower of a stun gun. "He laughed as a scholar laughs, hearing absurdity." "He screwed up the wistful torque of his half-smile and handed me two books; they smelled of cellar." "The scraping of shovels on pavements rang out like bells grown hoarse." How can I feign a semblance of objectivity toward a writer who forever alters how I hear the pealing of a snow shovel?

The truth is, she's no daintier than those other dames were. Like her sister church mice of literature, she's surprisingly, shockingly, anchored in the corporeal. Who but someone who has the capacity to be ecstatically physical could pull off a passage like this? "Running! It was the thrilling heat that propelled him, summer at the boil, steaming off his skin … strangely cold runnels of sweat dribbling down his shins. He was a flying bath, he was a fish hugging the tide, he was a wave!" Who could revel in reek, as she does here? "A radiant odor, just short of a stink, fumed out of the damp small of his back and his armpits."

Ms. Ozick may write convincingly of a certain Frau Mitwisser, so incapacitated by anxiety that the mere trappings of a grand hotel cause her "to shake and walk with her hand on her chest to hide her fright," but the same character is also revealed to be "a little woman with unknowable power." Ditto the protagonist, Rose: She's fragile enough so that three hours of typing leaves her enervated ("The tender balls of my fingers tingled, as if sparks had shot up from the keys; their glass shields had captured the light, and sent violet streaks into my pupils"), but her will is iron ("I would force her. I would press her with the force of an iron press").

Mistake these characters-and their author-at your peril. Enough diffidence is at work on the surface that you hardly notice, until too late, Ms. Ozick's aptitude for "thinking with a sublime ferocity" (a phrase she once pinned on the critic James Wood). Merry and warm she may be, and sweet in person, but never overlook that she's capable (as she proved in her last collection of essays) of taking the world to task-in terms sulfurous enough to roast varnish-for sentimentalizing Anne Frank. She ain't heavy. She just wears her gravity lightly, a trick worth the jereminds of a dozen blowhards.

Such indeed is the scope of her power, at this stage in a crowded career, that even her faults appear here to be strengths. Take, for example, a certain penchant for melodrama, manifest chiefly in the final sentences of various chapters. "His wife saw everything. He saw nothing." "The 'D,' she said, stood for Death-what else did I think it could be?" "It was not there. My fortune was gone." Never mind that the melodrama more than once turns out to be false (the fortune is found within five pages); still it seems a moral triumph that a writer of such high purpose should traffic in suspense and other equally plebeian, writerly wares. Composing a page-turner seems an act of literary unsqueamishness. Or am I once more being unduly deferential?

You'll notice, perhaps, that I've succeeded in fulfilling my allotted 1,200 words without dipping a proverbial toe into the novel's plot-an ambitious and commotion-packed yarn about a jumbled-about German refugee clan ensconced in the far reaches of the Bronx, who orbit the feckless, grown-up subject of a children's book (a character based on A.A. Milne's Christopher Robin). I've also nimbly side-stepped the Karaites, who have remained obscure (with good reason, it seems to me) since the eighth century. For this reticence, I claim a time-honored reason: I'm chicken!

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .

There's a rare breed of writer who, through heightened powers of observation and uncanny vocabulary, elevates the dross of current events into song. Not actual song-the sentences scan the same as anyone else's on the pages of The New York Times Magazine or Harper's -but song by dint of the writer's leapfrogging, rhapsodic vision. I'm talking about that odd duck, the poet-journalist, with a pitch so high the reader is either held spellbound or runs screaming from the room.

Why would an editor assign someone like Charles Siebert-the Brooklyn-based author of an "urban pastoral" memoir and an "autobiography" of a Jack Russell terrier-to write a book like A Man After His Own Heart , which is about the art, science, history, mythology and metaphysics of heart-harvesting? The idea is to lease a sensibility, to hire a block of the writer's time during which he will set his febrile consciousness loose on the topic at hand. In this case, Mr. Siebert was given four years: During that period, anything that falls under the writer's elegiac gaze, no matter how distantly related, is grist for the proverbial mill.

Some grist it is. Did you know that the human heart is made of the same muscle fibers that make up fly wings, that the Chinese intuited the circulatory nature of our bloodstream 3,000 years before William Harvey, and that the hearts of the hummingbird and the shrew ("curious cardiac counterparts-one airborne, the other earthbound-and yet equally skittish habitués, it seems, of their respective realms") beat as fast as 20 times per second? More startling still, people who receive new hearts often get the emotions and habits of the donors as well, thrown in free with the neurochemicals-"the donors' deaths being so sudden that their hearts continue to act as if they're still in their original owner's body."

With material this diverting, it's no wonder that 100 pages pass before Mr. Siebert gets the phone call to whisk that heightened consciousness of his over to New Jersey, where a heart is ready to go. But to call those first 100 pages mere throat-clearing would be missing the point. Those ruminations and flights of fancy-like the lyrical digression on his great-grandfather's chandelier-polishing at the Waldorf Astoria-are more than part and parcel of the story. When delivered by a writer minutely attuned to his own inner workings (and graced with so-called attention-surfeit disorder, a sister affliction to A.D.D. marked by both a "disposition to dote on the meaningless" and "a propensity for prolonged, mouth-agape, ape-like awe"), they are the story.

A parlous business, poet-journalism: One of the pitfalls, obviously, is this very discursiveness. It's lovely when Mr. Siebert excurses successfully, as when he watches fish in a tank "smoothly ply their walled and lighted days … continually arriving, in warped carousel, to the edges of a wakeful, drifting repose," or when he describes what it's like to suffer the peculiar New York insomnia whereby the metropolis "softly whirs like a huge, idling office machine. Here and there through the drifting rain, passing cars sound the two-beat clanks of manhole covers and then splay the night air, which, like mercury, quickly melds again." Yet other forays make you wonder why he doesn't sufficiently trust the central story to carry us through.

Mr. Siebert's earnest, self-conscious phraseology sometimes betrays too long an apprenticeship at the knee of Dylan Thomas or-perish the thought-Gerard Manley Hopkins. The reader wilts after four successive pages studded with such plummy constructions as "lawn-stranded saplings," "the day's too-wide air" or "the pinched, sky-pressed row houses of Flatlands, Brooklyn." He can be both precious, referring to his father as his "heart's author," and purple-one imagines him gasping if he were to be suddenly deprived of his favorite word, "thrum." Pushy, too-he sometimes strains to bend all imagery to fit the overarching metaphor, as when likening his car stuck in traffic to a "sentient bubble in an I.V. drip through the hardened, constricted arteries of authority"-one of several times he overplays the circulation trope. On an escalator, he feels "I was in a huge hypodermic needle, observing my own slow injection into … [a] whole other vein of existence." Hey, they're just moving stairs, bub.

On balance, however, Mr. Siebert-a self-confessed "heart hypochondriac" whose father died prematurely of genetic heart disease-holds his poesy in reserve, parceling it out for when he wants to take your breath away, as in this view from the Brooklyn Bridge "toward Manhattan's multi-tiered tableau of lights, both fixed and moving: mist-mottled office and apartment towers; the snaking red and white of street traffic; the sprocketed flicker of subway cars through East River bridge trellises; the smooth, soundless slides of helicopters and jets." And here are the "pole people," heart-transplant candidates requiring a constant infusion of drugs: "You have to sleep sitting up. Your hands and feet are always cold. Your complexion is gray. Your speech is perforated with urgent, shallow breaths. Daylight looks paler to you, and yet in the general diminishment of all your body's functions, oddly specific ones rally to compensate-your sense of smell, for one. Otherwise faint, apparitional days are suddenly cluttered by too-strong odors; perfumes and colognes seem more substantive to you than their wearers."

Passages such as these make A Man After His Own Heart nothing less than a scholarly epiphany, the entire four years of labor a splendid and, dare we say, heartfelt gift. But here's what makes Mr. Siebert a poet: After a bout of tachycardia, sometimes called "heart hurry" or, less nicely, "cardiac neurosis," the author gets himself wired up to a monitor for an entire day. How does it leave him feeling? "Sad the entire time, and a little cheap, as though I'd hired a private detective to spy on my own house, waiting for its main occupant, with whom I'd lived without question for so many years, to betray me." Dare some investigative journalist to come up with a leap like that one.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .

Only a few hours away by luxury jet lies an island paradise of palm trees and warm sand where the air itself feels forgiving. Lovely chocolate-skinned women wear pink nightgowns, jacarandas grow wild and the customary old-fashioned way to say "You're welcome" is to say "You're deserving." It's a charmed place where "the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter," and the clouds in the sky are said to be caused by dear, departed relatives eating coconuts with God. Eating Coconuts with God , in fact, wouldn't be a bad title for a lighthearted book about such a quaintly blessed place. Except there's a hitch: Bloodshed is rampant.

And so the title of Edwidge Danticat's new novel about Haiti is not Eating Coconuts with God , but rather The Dew Breaker ; it's named for the central character, a professional government torturer whose M.O. was to "break into your house … before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves." He'd break the dew, then systematically break your bones.

Recent news photos from this island are notable mostly for the numbing sense of déjà vu they engender in the viewer. Chrome guns gleam in black hands, frenzied crowds jubilate in the streets by stomping the heads of political opponents, an air of grim festivity pervades, like a World Series victory celebration gone mad. Haiti is again aswirl with wide-smiling violence; the air that should reek of bougainvillea is once more perfumed with gunpowder.

In prose as supple and deadpan as the tropical landscape she describes, Ms. Danticat colors in the blanks behind the headlines. A pot-bellied police officer smells "like fried eggs and gasoline, like breakfast at the Amoco." Traumatized victims gibber in their sleep, wetting their beds "not with urine but with words." Innocent bystanders tend "to be silent a moment too long during an important conversation and then say too much." Others simply go bananas, like the father who manifests his insanity by "walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist." Yet life, perforce, goes on. Here's ordinary daily sexual yearning, as felt by a husband for a wife who has finally come from Haiti to join him in his rented American basement room after a separation of years: "She smelled good, a mixture of lavender and lime. He simply wanted to get her home, if home it was … and to reduce the space between them until there was no air for her to breathe that he was not breathing too."

Ms. Danticat has set herself a sacred mission: to give weight and dignity to those whose grainy faces we glimpse between sips of our morning coffee, "men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives." She writes about them in a voice that's so surprisingly flat as to be almost inert, as though run through a wringer.

Each chapter features a different character, nearer to or farther from the heart of darkness-violence engulfs even those distant from the epicenter. The reader needs to be something of a locksmith to fit the pieces together. "It's like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man," one of the characters remarks, and you won't master all the connections until the closing pages, when it clicks into place with the aha of satisfaction. But the satisfaction is a hurtful one, radiating as it does from the central character, the eponymous dew breaker, who claims the final chapter for himself.

"One of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again," this torturer is not a nice fellow. "He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women." Perhaps the ultimate unforgivable injustice he commits is this: "He'd wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he'd wound you again. He thought he was God."

Yet it's the singular achievement of this novel to make us feel bad for the bad guy. Who can be privy to his rationalizations and guilt, his familial love and childhood dreams, without acknowledging that even he-especially he-has within him the seeds of redemption? "You and me, we save him," his wife tells his daughter, when she learns the truth. "When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root."

The wistful contends with the brutish. The ghastliest atrocities-facial scalping "where skin was removed from dead victims' faces to render them unidentifiable," whipping the soles of the feet till they bleed, making casual foes drink a gallon of gas and then lighting a match-are counterbalanced by paeans to human beauty: eyes that are "chartreuse" or "velvet-brown," skin that is "the color of sorrel" or "silken and very black, her few wrinkles … more like beauty marks than signs of old age." Or this: "Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out."

These details are delivered languidly, leaf by leaf, as it were, like the leaves falling from the green ash trees, "shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze … seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles." As they accumulate-the details of beauty no less inexorably than the details of torture-they acquire the specific gravity of truth.

Here we learn exactly what it feels like to inhabit a body that is no longer your own: "The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire …. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he'd tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards and cracks in the concrete."

In one of those odd quirks of human convergence, Jackie Onassis, diminutively disembarking a queen-sized yacht one day back in the 1970's, apparently made a vivid impression on the natives of Haiti. They liked her style. They liked her pink Bermuda shorts and her wide-rimmed sunglasses. Most of all, they liked her grace: "She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful."

With her grace and her imperishable humanity, her devotion to lives lived like "a pendulum between forgiveness and regret," Edwidge Danticat is every bit Jackie's equal. About her, too, it can be said: She makes sadness beautiful.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .