The Have-Nots
By Katharina Hacker
Translated from German by Helen Atkins
Europa, 352 pp., paperback, $14.95
The title characters, the have-nots of this unsettling novel, are not its protagonists but rather features of the human landscape in which its more advantaged central characters act out their amorphous crises.
As the novel opens, a young Berlin lawyer named Jakob has experienced two extraordinary strokes of luck. Just back from a business trip to New York, he missed by one day the conflagration at the World Trade Center that took the life of a colleague; and, by coincidence, he has been reunited with Isabelle, the woman he has longed for since knowing her briefly 10 years earlier. Isabelle is a blank slate on which men write their most inchoate desires. Rather offhandedly, the couple marry and move to London. While Jakob gets caught up in sexual gamesmanship at his British law firm, Isabelle, left at loose ends, becomes naively, dangerously entangled with two neighbors, an abused child and a brooding hoodlum.
Katharina Hacker draws out through indirection and a sense of suspended menace the inner lives of characters utterly dissimilar in portion and privilege. The term, "Pinteresque," comes to mind, and not simply because of the novel's evocative north London setting.
A Chant To Soothe Wild Elephants
By Jaed Coffin
Da Capo, 224 pp., paperback, $16
Born to a G.I. and his Thai bride, Jaed Coffin grew up in Maine. He was an apple-pie American boy, though one who occasionally visited faraway Panomsarakram, his mother's native village in Thailand, where he would climb coconut trees with his cousins and watch his grandfather, a medicine man, dispense his cures. Midway through a college degree in philosophy, Coffin, seeking that missing half of himself, went back to Panomsarakram to become a monk.
His calling didn't last long. Not because the villagers rejected him: The moment the lanky American took up his saffron robe and his alms bowl, they treated him with reverence and sweetly sought his advice. Yet, awkward and earnest, Coffin failed to convince himself. His most poignant memory of those months is of an innocent flirtation with a village girl, forbidden to a holy man.
Coffin can be forgiven the cursory depiction of his exotic surroundings; to the extent that this is a travelogue, it relates an inner journey. Self-doubt, however, falls short of self-awareness as the stuff from which to build a memoir. An epilogue taking Coffin from Madrid to Alaska and back to Maine suggests that he still hasn't found what he's looking for.
We Disappear
By Scott Heim
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95
Returning to the scene (small-town Kansas) and the theme (childhood trauma) of his earlier novel-turned-film, "Mysterious Skin," Scott Heim works up a creepy sweat in "We Disappear."
The narrator - also named Scott - performs his own return to the scene when he gives in to the importunes of his mother, Donna, and goes home to Kansas from New York, where he is at the end of his rope. Hard-luck Donna, widowed and terminally ill, has become obsessed with reports of missing children. With Scott reluctantly humoring her, Donna's obsession escalates. Passing themselves off as writers, they seek out family members of the missing. Then, out of nowhere, Donna dredges up memories of having been kidnapped as a child. When he finds a teenage loner camped out in the basement, is the boy Donna's victim or another enabler? Scott, bound by his own frailties, sees no way to halt the melodrama but to follow it.
Is family what breaks us or what makes us whole? Heim may intend some sort of emotional parable, but his narrative prose, as flat as the Kansas plains, works against any interpretation but a literal one.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
