Novel

May is not a month for masterpieces. There's no Coover, no Roddy Doyle. Those hungry for story might in good conscience consider the tried and the true. The four novels cited here, however, are all good reads, and one is an absolute delight.A. S. Byatt, the English novelist and Booker-winning author of "Possession," presents a big, juicy feminist saga. Yet although "Babel Tower" (Random House. 619 pages. $25.95) is billed as a 1960s novel, it lacks the spirit of that fervent decade. One character even refers scornfully to "the whole Aldermaston thing," dismissing the important anti-nuclear march.

It is a damp, bleak morning. Deep in the bowels of her Columbia town house, Ruth Glick sits drumming her fingernails in the shadowy light.Tap. Tap. Tap.She and co-author Eileen Buckholtz quietly plot their next Harlequin novel. Their heroine, Jessica Adams, is trying to make a vampire movie. Unfortunately, cast members keep showing up dead with neck bites.But the vampire angle isn't quite enough. The novel needs more danger.It needs . . . birds.It's Mrs. Buckholtz's idea. A flock could attack Jessica while she scouts out an old house for filming.

All novels, declared John Updike in a recent issue of the New Yorker, are about mating.And, as if to prove his thesis, here among February's candy hearts and valentines comes an array of novels exploring the multifariousness of love.Antonya Nelson, who published an award-winning first novel in 1996 called "Talking in Bed," shows no signs of a sophomore slump in her vivacious second effort. "Nobody's Girl" (Scribner, 288 pages, $22) stars Birdy Stone, a bookish young woman who has fled her staid Chicago life for a taste of the rustic charms of Pinetop, N.M. Living in a trailer on the poor side of town, Birdy spends her days teaching English Lit classics to indifferent high school seniors and her nights getting high with Jesus, her gay best friend.

"Ten Indians: A Novel," by Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon Books. 272 pages. $23What can one person do? In 1955 Rosa Parks defied the law by riding in the front of a bus. She became a heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, but heroism is no shield. In 1994, a thief entered her apartment, smashed her face, and stole $54. In Ten Indians Baltimore novelist Madison Smartt Bell targets Baltimore's black-on-black violence, with Rosa Parks clearly in mind.Bell's eleventh book, Ten Indians is his first novel since his 1995 National Book Award nominee, All Souls' Rising.

HOLLYWOOD -- Zoe Heller sold the film rights to her acclaimed novel What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal with a simple promise to herself: "I made up my mind very early that if you sell the rights to someone, you're handing it over to someone to do with it what they will. It's a losing proposition to kind of remain proprietorial," she said. Which is not to say that she wasn't hopeful. She had known of Patrick Marber, the screenwriter hired to translate her Booker Prize finalist novel for the screen, since they overlapped at Oxford University in the early 1980s.

Susan Straight is in love with words, the way they sound, the images they suggest, the energies they possess. Here she describes the protagonist of her second novel, "Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights":"Darnell worked in a cloud of moving grit, and only the sliding drops of sweat carried the dust from his forehead, his neck. He stayed away from Jackson Park, working all alone in the gas station, feeling the black heat rise on the asphalt all around him until he imagined that he looked like one of the zombies from the alley, his eyes sunk gray into his skull, his palms permanently gray.

Outstanding among the new windfall of winter novels is a salty coming-of-age tale by Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Set on Hawaii's Big Island, "Heads by Harry" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pages, $24) is the story of Toni Yagyuu, daughter of a Japanese taxidermist and his schoolteacher wife, who struggles through a stormy adolescence in the home above her father's shop in the town of Hilo. Caught between her passion for the art of taxidermy and her father's more lofty expectations for her, Toni has equally embattled relationships with the rest of her family, alternating between cruelty and fierce loyalty toward her flamboyantly gay older brother and her vain, fashion-plate younger sister.

"Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea," by Richard Bausch. HarperCollins. 402 pages. $24.Richard Bausch's new novel, starts off as a charming coming-of-age tale, a breezy period piece, but slowly and confidently it morphs into a flinty, dream-slaying chiller. The impeccably graceful, nearly translucent prose introduces you to a young idealist, Walter Marshall of Washington circa 1964, and invites you to watch the progress of his - and by proxy the country's - disillusionment.

"Gloria" is a novel about a man named Stone writing a book about a woman named Lauren writing a book about his (Stone's) nTC dead sister, who wasn't named Gloria, but called herself that, and who (as the reader will be relieved to learn) didn't write any books herself. Gloria, as a matter of fact, barely even wrote a postcard. She's a mystery wrapped up in a lot of different wrappers. In a work of this kind, the layers themselves are often of as much or more interest as the kernel inside, but Mark Coovelis' first novel doesn't entirely follow that rule.

For the neighborhood goblin whose spirit is not appeased by mere candy, Anne Rice's "Violin" (Knopf. 289 pages. $25.95) might be a tasty treat.Like most of her novels, it's a passionate mixture of earthly fears and supernatural terrors, with lots of blood and darkness spread round the edges. The new ingredient this time is a heavy dose of classical gas - the ghosts of Beethoven and Paganini mingle with lesser known shades to titillate the soul of an aspiring young musician named Triana.For goblins with a high IQ, however, Rice's novel may prove more of a trick than a treat.