Unraveling marriages, inspired designs

Homesick Creek
By Diane Hammond
Doubleday, 341 pp., $23.95

Envy
By Kathyrn Harrison
Random House, 301 pp., $24.95

Rococo
By Adriana Trigiani
Random House, 272 pp., $24.95

Any or all of these three novels would make good summer reading. They're quite different, but each is totally involving, in its own way.

Diane Hammond's ''Homesick Creek" follows two troubled marriages and an enduring friendship through some exceptionally difficult midlife straits, and does so with sensitivity and intelligence. Given the material, this could be a three-hankie job, but the story never turns maudlin, thanks to Hammond's clean prose, pitch-perfect dialogue, and keen eye for social detail. ''Homesick Creek" is a worthy successor to her sure-footed first novel, ''Going to Bend." Actually, it's even better.

Hammond returns to Hubbard, Ore., the same down-at-the-heels seaside resort town that was the setting for ''Going to Bend." Bunny and Anita, best friends since high school, are just past 40, still living in Hammond, where they grew up. Bunny has been a waitress at the Anchor Grill for 21 years. Her husband, Hack, ''a born salesman," works at a car dealership in nearby Sawyer. He's successful enough to provide Bunny with the material things she craves, but Bunny isn't happy because she suspects he's unfaithful. Hack guards secrets from Bunny, old wounds that help to explain his erratic behavior.

Anita is married to Bob, her high school sweetheart, who spends most of his paycheck on beer and periodic ''mystery trips." Anita and Bob rent a rundown house, its yard littered with broken cars that Bob hauls home and never fixes. Despite their poverty, and Bob's drinking, Anita and Bob love each other. She trusts him completely, but Bob has another life, a dangerous life Anita can't begin to imagine. The story moves back and forth in time as characters reveal their histories and recall pivotal moments. Human fallibility runs through this novel, a presence on every page. Hammond also has created a vibrant assortment of secondary characters and meshed them deftly into the plot. ''Homesick Creek" is an honest, finely nuanced, emotionally rich novel.

Will Moreland, the New York psychoanalyst at the center of ''Envy," Kathyrn Harrison's complex and disturbing sixth novel, is unable to analyze what's wrong with his own life, which is rapidly unraveling. He's tormented by almost constant pornographic fantasies involving his patients. It's been three years since he and his wife, Carole, lost their 10-year-old son, and she still won't talk to him about the boating accident that claimed the boy's life. Will's 74-year-old veterinarian father has become a celebrated photographer. Will is mystified by the images his father creates, and unsettled by the fact that his father is having an affair. Will is estranged from his brother, Mitch, a famous distance swimmer, his identical twin except for a port-wine birthmark that covers more than half his face. Will hasn't seen or heard from him for years, since the eve of his and Carole's wedding, when Mitch delivered a rancorous toast to his brother at the rehearsal dinner.

Will attends his 25th reunion at Cornell University, where he hopes to run into a former girlfriend, Elizabeth. From her class notes, Will learns that she gave birth to a daughter eight months after they broke up. He has become obsessed by the notion that he may be the father of this young woman. He confronts Elizabeth and demands a sample of her daughter's hair, for DNA testing. She refuses, saying, ''You are an excellent example of why it is people think shrinks are nuts." Shortly after the reunion Will acquires a new patient, a sexually aggressive, fiercely intellectual young woman, tattooed, sulky, disheveled. She tells Will she has a habit of ''collecting" older men, and collects him with a vengeance on his office floor. The plot keeps twisting like a corkscrew, as Will attempts to cope with lies and betrayals.

Harrison is an accomplished writer who, fairly or otherwise, probably will always be best known for ''The Kiss," a memoir about her affair with her father that created a sensation when it was published in the late 1990s. She has written additional memoirs, working through her troubled past. She brings everything she's learned to her fiction. ''Envy" is a masterfully constructed, insightful novel of psychosexual suspense that explores the destructive power of loss, betrayal, guilt, and envy.

Adriana Trigiani's warm and folksy Big Stone Gap trilogy has earned her a large, adoring audience. In ''Rococo" she moves to another small town (Our Lady of Fatima, N.J.), another time (the 1970s), and tries on a male voice. Bartolomeo di Crespi is the most sought-after interior decorator in and around OLOF, as the natives call their town. His House of B has a signature style, the rococo period, where ''French design and Italian flair came together to make my heart leap for joy in my chest." When his beloved church is scheduled for renovation, Bartolomeo assumes he'll get the job, but it's not that simple.

Bartolomeo is a marvelous narrator, funny, sophisticated, wise. ''Rococo" isn't long on plot. The fun -- and this novel is a treat -- is in the large cast of characters the author has rounded up. Bartolomeo's family and friends are eccentric, unpredictable, entertaining. And Trigiani's detailed descriptions of 1970s decor are priceless.

Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.