Two from Japan, ideas, innocence

Novels Of September

"What Are You Like?" by Irish writer Anne Enright (Atlantic Monthly Press, 257 pages, $24) withholds its truths until the very end. Berts loses his wife in childbirth, marries Evelyn, and raises his daughter Maria, who "always felt like the wrong girl." In this claustrophobic world "you can drown in a saucer of water." Not having a mother is "like a gash on your soul." A woman named Rose suddenly appears.

Maria wanders, having lost not only her mother, but the entire world. She spirals downward. "What are you waiting for?" her stepmother Evelyn demands of Maria, who will not visit. The reply is "Just," a word echoed in Rose's world. The ending is a miracle: "Berts was astonished, again, by women. How they have no choice." There is an exquisite biological reconciliation that lifts this book's spirits to heretofore undreamed of heights.

"Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage" by Amy Jenkins (Little, Brown and Co., 282 pages, $24.95) is an anti-romantic London-based post-feminist generational tale. Jenkins posits the pursuit of love today as "spacious and hygienic." She readjusts the ironic credo that opens "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirty-something single woman in possession of good fortune must (a) be wanting a man and (b) be having trouble finding one."

Jenkins insists that women are no longer compelled to compromise "because they no longer need husbands to bring home the bacon. They can simply buy a liver and bacon ready-meal from Marks & Spencer." There are six steps to "Get A Husband." The sociological riffs make this novel fun.

Joan Mellen teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of 15 books and is currently writing a biography of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.