Short takes

Modern Ranch Living

By Mark Jude Poirier

Miramax, 304 pp., $23.95

If the world really is to end not with a bang but a whimper, this is where it will happen, in the metastasizing sprawl of the American Southwest, the setting of this vivid, edgy novel by Mark Jude Poirier. The signs of imminent exhaustion are everywhere: in the coyotes scavenging suburban arroyos, in the teenage stoners roaming housing developments with faux-Western names, even in the deadpan weather reports that begin each chapter: ''Hot and dry, high 111"; ''Cooler, high 97." This is no fit place for human life.

It is the summer of 2001. The novel swoops down cinematically over sweltering Tucson for a close-up look at two victims of the pervasive funk. Sixteen-year-old Kendra channels her adolescent anger into bodybuilding, obsessively disciplining her physique while chaos roils her undeveloped mind. At 30, her neighbor Merv subsists in quiet desperation, managing an amusement park, living with his crazy mother, waiting passively for his life to begin.

Losers, we think. But Poirier gets inside these oddball characters and finds more complexity, humor, even pathos than we'd have thought possible. By the time autumn rolls around, bringing Sept. 11, both have already been jolted by the unexpected and have done some growing up, some reaching out. The wasteland may be hospitable to human life after all.

The Sunday Philosophy Club

By Alexander McCall Smith

Pantheon, 247 pp., $19.95

A divorced Scots woman of independent mind and comfortable means, Isabel Dalhousie is the editor -- in fact, the entire staff-- of an obscure philosophical journal, the Review of Applied Ethics. She works the daily crossword puzzle, collects art, enjoys music, meddles in her niece's love life, and still finds time to play amateur sleuth in this new mystery by Alexander McCall Smith, set not in the Botswana of his ''No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" but cozily at home in Smith's own Edinburgh.

At a concert one evening, Isabel is horrified when a young man plunges past her from the balcony to his death. Guided by the precepts of moral philosophy, she feels obliged to discover who he was and why he died, an inquiry that leads her to the city's elite investment firms -- and to the suspicion that his death was no accident.

Dignified enough to be embarrassed by her prying, principled enough to persevere, Isabel is an intriguing heroine for what promises to be a continuing series.

In the tradition of amateur detection, her methods are dangerously nave. The denouement, however, governed by the subtleties of moral philosophy, is a stark, even radical departure from the norms of the genre.

Change Baby

By June Spence

Riverhead, 230 pp., $23.95

Needing time out from a destructive love affair, Avie Goss returns to her hometown in rural North Carolina to care for her ailing, widowed, and very prickly mother, Mabry. Avie is a ''change baby," born when Mabry was old enough to be her grandmother; the brother and sister Avie scarcely knows had already grown up and left home. One constant presence in her childhood was sturdy, stoical Zephra Overby, for so many years such an integral part of the Goss household that Avie assumed she was kin.

Owing to the hill-country taciturnity of her elders, as well as her capacity for self-absorption, there is a great deal that Avie does not know about her family. The longer she stays on, the more is revealed to her through the startling confessions of the two older women, finally letting go of the secrets that bind them together as they see their end approaching.

Avie's own narrative of emotional turmoil lacks crispness and distinction. By contrast, the gritty oral histories delivered by Zephra and Mabry, country women long acquainted with hurt and hard times, haunt the novel like gothic ghosts from a bygone America.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.