Discoveries

Great Dream of Heaven: Stories, Sam Shepard, Alfred A. Knopf: 160 pp., $20

Character and landscape compete in western fiction. Sometimes characters cross the border into cartoonhood, and sometimes they coexist gracefully with the overwhelming beauty of their natural context. Sam Shepard is a student of character, but his are not cartoons. They are too flexible, too fallible. His playwriting skills -- dialogue, monologue, timing and conceit -- make his fiction shimmer with a brutal clarity. This is especially evident in these stories, which, like much of Shepard’s writing, are about bad fathers -- emotionally reckless, violent, absent -- intellectual cowards who inflict shame and worse on their sons.

In the story “The Remedy Man,” a character who tames unruly horses (“not a horse whisperer”) is called out to cure a horse and cures, in the process, a 14-year-old boy locked in his father’s world: “E.V. winked at me and in that wink I understood there might be grown men in this world who actually get a spark out of life and somehow manage to dodge the black hole my dad had fallen into.” Shepard has a nice way of burying the “I” in his stories, which often end in a vista. Rather than getting closer, the fathers recede into the distance while the sons move on.

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Counting My Chickens And Other Home Thoughts, The Duchess of Devonshire, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 176 pp., $20

“To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction,” writes Tom Stoppard in his introduction to these reminiscences by the sister of Jessica Mitford and lady of one of the great houses of the world, Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Reading her accounts of gardening (“Moss is the thing”) and communists (“to be in their presence was a lowering thing”), one must glance back and forth between the chummy nicknames in the text and the footnotes explaining their identities.

The duchess, age “four score plus,” expresses great befuddlement at such things as televisions, computers and note paper with addresses on the bottom, but stunning equanimity regarding such subjects as windows and war atrocities, things that tend to receive similar emphasis. The subject of class, “which people go on about now almost as much as they do about sex,” is far less fascinating to the duchess than the minutes of the meeting of the local Dry Stone Walling Assn. The luxurious pace of the memoir is extremely relaxing. All it takes is a little willing suspension of political beliefs.

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Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, David Lodge, Harvard University Press: 272 pp., $24.95

You have to watch out for David Lodge, one of our most brilliant critics. He has a tendency to lead a reader down a very long tunnel. Conveniently, he is the only person who knows the way out, and this creates a slavish devotion to his views. Stand firm! But read on.

Lodge looks at the differences between literary and scientific ideas of consciousness. In literature, he quotes Noam Chomsky (the “dense specificity of personal experience” is unique from character to character). Physicist Gerald Edelman writes that events are far denser than scientific explanation; in Joseph Conrad’s words, the best that literature can do is make you feel before it makes you see.

Lodge explains the concept of “qualia,” a word used in both cultures to describe the “specific nature of our subjective experience of the world,” like the “smell of coffee or the taste of pineapple.” Lodge writes about the modern novel with its placement of narrative within consciousness, sometimes sacrificing “narrative cohesion,” in contrast to classical novels in which characters are created from the outside in. He applies these thoughts to the work of Henry James, John Updike, Philip Roth, Amis pere et fils, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens. A woman might have been nice.