DISCOVERIES

TWO CITIES: Stories. By John Edgar Wideman (Houghton Mifflin: 256 pp., $24)

Once writers who burst preconceptions would give us a new formula with which to piece them together. Now if we’re lucky, we get new voices from our best fiction writers, not formulas. Literary canons are just the ladders these writers climb to give us new insight.

In these stories, Wideman’s characters, wandering through their two cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, are as determined and vulnerable as John Steinbeck’s in “Grapes of Wrath.” When they survive, they survive for all of us. His sentences are, for the most part, rapid fire meteor showers of language, history and urban landscape, slowing down only for parables: “You know the old story about the big fish that got away,” thinks one character. “The guy’s not lying. He feels the empty between his hands growing each time he tells his story, each time the damned fish gets away again.”

HARVEST SON: Planting Roots in American Soil. By David Mas Masumoto (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $22.95)

You should know the peach man. In his last book, “Epitaph for a Peach,” David Mas Masumoto described his efforts to grow an unusually delicious but difficult variety and brought both his native Buddhism and his Sansei savvy to bear.

The dominant metaphor in “Harvest Son” is pruning--pruning trees through generations, not just on the family farm in California but also in Japan, where Masumoto travels to find his father’s family. Returning home, he visits the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, where his father and mother lived from 1942 to 1946. When they got out, the family moved to the 40-acre farm in Del Rey, Calif., where Masumoto farms today. He remembers his grandmother eating a peach with no teeth: “She’d select a gushy one, missed by the pickers and hidden behind the leaves and branches until overripe. She’d remove her dentures and gnaw the fruit, the juices squirting into her mouth and drooling down her chin. . . .” His father, on the other hand, would carefully sculpt away the skin of the peach with a paring knife, “the precision of a fine craftsman’s touch.” Masumoto himself “roams over the furrows and through the grass, searching for the golden amber shades of the ripest fruit.”

ARMADILLO. By William Boyd (Alfred A. Knopf: 338 pp., $24)

William Boyd has a frisky style, plots that are intricate balsa wood models of a story, characters who never have just one identity. “Armadillo” is a house of cards. You know it will come down under the sheer weight of British irony. But Boyd’s characters have soul as well--humor, fear, secrets and self-deprecation.

Lorimer Black is a 31-year-old senior loss adjuster for an insurance company in London. His real name, known to no one, is Milomre Blocj. He comes from a family of Transnistrian gypsies, whom he visits now and then bearing slabs of meat. He is a stylish dresser, buys his flowers from foul-mouthed Marlobe, who owns a flower shack, and his medieval armor--the barbutes and burgonets and sallets he collects--from Ivan Algomir, gallery owner, taste master and fashion advisor. One of the great joys of “Armadillo” is the vernacular. When Lorimer is invited to a dinner party, Ivan inspects the invitation. “ ‘Black tie?’ he said. ‘That’s a bit naff isn’t it?’ He sniffed. . . . ‘Sounds very dodgy to me.’ ” Words like “jackanapes” and rain that looks “spittley” and employees who get “sacked” are a bonus. It is the very triteness of these characters’ revelations, the skimpiness of their armor against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that will keep you chortling (a twitty, nasal sound) all the way to the end.

A SEASON IN HELL. By Marilyn French (Alfred A. Knopf: 256 pp., $23)

In 1992, Marilyn French, author of “The Women’s Room,” was found to have metastasized esophageal cancer. This is the journal from her four-year fight and triumph over disease. French has the immediate, unqualified and generous support of friends like Gloria Steinem and other members of an illustrious coven (as they call themselves) that meets frequently to help solve each other’s problems. She also has the loving support of her two children.

But there are an alarming number of references to French’s wealth, to her Porsche and her pool and her houses, culminating in this stunning passage, which refers to her search for a caregiver: “I wanted to hire someone who could cook and care for me but who could also be trusted to drive my Porsche. Since this person would be with me for much of the day, I wanted it to be someone I liked--an equal, not a servant.”

A lot of French’s introspection during her crisis has a simplistic tone of entitlement: Doctors are barbarians, she can’t get enough privacy in the hospital, she hates the garish TV selling products to lesser life forms, reviewers of her books have a mysterious agenda against her. “I am no longer driven,” she writes in the end. “I am permitted to enjoy myself.” Fair enough. Leaves a lot of us who are not in the coven out in the cold.

BECH AT BAY: A Quasi-Novel. By John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf: 242 pp., $23)

This book is so similar in tone and content to Woody Allen’s last movie, “Deconstructing Harry,” that one becomes afraid Allen and Updike have morphed. Why say it, I know. Why should every book Updike writes be an inspirational masterpiece? But “quasi-novels”? No, thank you.

Bech, 63 in 1986, travels to Europe but is unhappy there because Europe equals Hitler. He returns to New York, where he leers at young women in publishing. He goes to parties with other great writers (“ ‘Izzy’--he found himself giving the man a hug, Communist-style, Brezhnev to Chou Enlai--’they don’t make bullshitters like you anymore.’ ”) He descends into a spiral of revenge killings against reviewers who have given him negative notices. He wins the 1999 Nobel Prize for literature. The world, as usual, rewards him for being a schmuck. Surely there are better uses for Updike’s talent.