Short Takes
A Family Daughter
By Maile Meloy
Scribner, 325 pp., $24
Psychoanalysts speak of repetition compulsion, though few have suggested that the disorder is genetic. In this wry and rangy novel by Maile Meloy, the affliction seems to be not only hereditary but contagious as well, as characters related or acquainted compulsively fall into, emerge from, and fall back again into the same dysfunctional relationships.
In ''A Family Daughter," Meloy makes a compulsive return of her own to the extended Santerre family, introduced in her first novel, ''Liars and Saints," nice, respectable people to whom sexual melodramas of all sorts -- infidelity, divorce, bisexual experimentation, illicit pregnancy, consensual incest -- just seem to happen, as, say, scheduling snafus or bookkeeping errors happen to other nice families. Even a Parisian prostitute who briefly enters their orbit finds the Santerre soap opera perverse.
To the extent that the story, as busy as a Victorian saga though considerably less buttoned up, has a point-of-view protagonist, it is Abby, granddaughter of the elder Santerres, who spends much of the novel writing a roman à clef tantalizingly like the one we're reading, knocking her family for a loop. Meloy creates a diversity of appealing, exasperating characters, even if the troubles they keep bringing upon themselves exhibit a reductive sameness.
Uncentering the Earth
By William T. Vollmann
Norton, 240 pp., illustrated, $22.95
Venturing outside his genre but not out of his depth, the novelist William Vollmann offers a non-scientist's appreciation of the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus, whose ''Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" overturned the Earth-centered Ptolemaic model of the universe, shaking the foundations of Western thought.
Like a critic inspecting the prose of a literary classic, Vollmann gives an elegant close reading of Copernicus's 16th-century treatise. Vollmann's disclaimer that his is an amateur's explication of a subject ''slightly beyond" his competence must make the innumerate reader, boggled by his detailed analysis of Copernicus's calculations, feel small indeed.
More generally accessible is Vollmann's evocation of the constraints under which the astronomer had to work in a kind of intellectual bondage. Copernicus was treading on heretical ground. Pious and reclusive (the legend that his newly published treatise was placed in his hand as he lay dying is the most colorful event of his life), he cautiously balanced his theory of a sun-centered universe against the doctrinal obedience his church demanded. Future giants, less submissive, would stand on his shoulders. Knowledge would progress, despite dogma's everlasting war against truth.
The Tree-Sitter
By Suzanne Matson
Norton, 246 pp., $23.95
At 20, an honors student at Wellesley, Julie Price feels a growing discontent with her life of unearned privilege. She scorns her career-driven mother. But there is no passion that drives Julie, nothing to which she desires unreservedly to commit herself.
Nothing, that is, until she meets Neil, an MIT graduate student and firebrand environmentalist. In a fever of first love, Julie follows him to Oregon, where they join a cell of forest-dwelling protesters who camp out in lofty tree houses, putting their bodies between the giant Douglas firs and the loggers' ravenous saws. When Neil turns toward other, more aggressive paths of protest, Julie must decide how far to follow him.
The outcome is never seriously in doubt. Julie loses her heart, but she is in no danger of losing her wits. She is not so much the heroine of a romantic adventure as a detached observer watching herself perform in one. But because the principles, and the extremism that feeds on them, are Neil's, not her own, the cost to her of rejecting them is not high. The novel is thus less morally complex than it might have been were we not all -- author, heroine, reader -- standing outside looking in.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
