Discoveries

Our Father Who Art in a Tree, Judy Pascoe, Random House: 200 pp., $19.95

Italo Calvino, you’re thinking. “Baron in the Trees.” Perhaps. Simone is 10 when her father dies and goes straight to the uppermost branches in the poinciana tree beside the house she lives in with her mother and three brothers. This is Australia, and stranger things have happened; stranger, even, than in Italy.

Bluntly put, he will not let family members get on with their lives. When his widow begins a flirtation with the drain man, the branches of the tree shoot straight into her bedroom. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Of course, the tree must be cut down. “It was simple for me,” Judy Pascoe’s novel begins, in Simone’s voice, “the saints were in heaven and guardian angels had extendable wings like Batman and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the backyard.”

There is something utterly godless about Australian fiction. It’s as if the spaces, even greater than our own in America, had entered the creative process of its artists. Jokes take longer. Every law of physics is up for grabs and ridicule. To be surprised is to admit naivete. The drain man! So decent and worthy. “It was God’s mistake, Mum called it. A big mistake, and she spoke like she was going to get her revenge on God and take Him on somehow in a duel. I knew when I saw her looking up to the heavens that she was thinking, So that’s your best shot? Like it hadn’t crippled her.” Guess, just guess who wins that round? There’s nothing those people can’t do.

*

Featherstone, Kirsty Gunn, Houghton Mifflin: 256 pp., $24

I’ve been watching this New Zealander, Kirsty Gunn, for a long time, just waiting for her to settle down and write quiet, orderly fiction. I’m happy to report that thus far, she just gets wilder, even as her characters become more mature, upstanding citizens than, say, the children of drunks in her fantastic early novel, “Rain.”

In this ambitious novel, Gunn weaves together the subconscious lives of a small town’s inhabitants. She takes a cross-section of their daily lives, revealing subterraneous layers that are beyond weird. Scary.

Take Sonny, the old man who likes to garden. He can see things, beyond the real, and he tries to warn the people he loves. Or the minister’s wife, who will never have children but is very good at saving children in distress. Or the rapist, whose entire soul and body have been longing for the girl he once loved. There’s Margaret, who runs the local bar/hotel -- a woman who knows there are some things you just can’t take away from a girl, no matter what you do to her or how you trap her.

Gunn’s writing -- violent at times -- is pushed by desire, and I do mean sexual. There’s a heat to it that does not let up. “You come in upon a person’s house,” she writes so innocently, “you see the quietest things.”

*

The Amount to Carry, Stories, Carter Scholz, Picador: 208 pp., $23

“Like my father, I was past reclamation and against my will was forced to this knowledge.” This thought echoes from the mind of the young boy who creates the catastrophe machine -- a sort of beautiful mind that the establishment tries to co-opt for its nefarious military purposes -- into all the stories in this collection. Men march mindlessly into their own souls’ destruction, like lambs to slaughter, like lemmings.

Lt. Col. Andrews, national hero, man on the moon, in middle age slips into his real self. The career is over when he quotes Lord Byron on the “Today” show. How embarrassing. There is R. Blumfeld, the elderly bachelor, long gone and abusing the furniture in his rented flat. Or the lost young man in the Berkeley commune, whose Western-forged philosophy is held up by such unlikely figures as Darwin, Kafka, Picasso and by such unlikely goals as conquering space or a fair economy in which the workers reap the rewards of their labor. The 20th century is thus exposed as a fraud and a broken promise. All the men were sacrificed.