DISCOVERIES

THE MARRIED MAN A Love Story by Edmund White; Alfred A. Knopf: 336 pp., $25 So much gay fiction is set in the beau monde, the upper class or in the street life of our meanest cities. Vogue or Hustler. There isn’t enough literature of day-to-day gay life percolating into the coffee cups of mainstream publishers, which only heightens the isolation of the gay experience. Edmund White’s lovers in this novel of present-day Paris are regular people, obeying the same dark currents and phases of the moon that draw all lovers together and fling them apart. They have histories. They are afraid, but they commit. His portrait of life in the shadow of AIDS is heartbreaking in its simplicity: Death is a guest at the party who stays a while and does not leave with the person he came with.

But the humility makes White’s subject real, makes his writing plain. I much prefer his nonfiction, even the slender “Our Paris,” which has more metaphor and perspective than much of his fiction. For a notoriously stylish man, his writing is domestic, even chatty. Gimlet-eyed, a keen observer of detail, White sometimes flies painfully low, using his rich understanding of art and culture to create personalities that flutter on the page like paper dolls.

THE NAME OF THE WORLD by Denis Johnson; HarperCollins: 120 pp., $23

Maybe you’re already a member of the cult of Denis Johnson, joined when you first read “Jesus’ Son” (coming this month to theaters near you). Then, perhaps, you were grateful when he wrote “Already Dead,” the funny but not ridiculous portrait of hippies in Northern California. It was so much fun to read. But more important even than fun is that Johnson, in his fiction, makes you nostalgic for something in yourself, some lost country in your soul that you have almost forgotten. Usually, he has the decency to cover up this invasion of your privacy with humor.

But this book is different. “The Name of the World” reinvents everything, even good manners. The flap copy promises funny, but that’s for cowards, God bless ‘em. Michael Reed is a professor at a small Midwestern college whose 34-year-old wife and 5-year-old daughter have been killed in a car crash. The novel covers the period, a few years after the initial shock, when Reed tries to find his place again, tries to feel something, anything. “I was grieving for someone who was dead,” he thinks, “and death is such a physical thing. . . . I didn’t want physical things.” He has managed to stave off his grief until a young woman he fancies takes him home and tells him the story of her brief kidnapping when she was 4. Something her kidnapper said to her awakens Reed, and though it makes for a lousy date, it is one of the finest, deepest moments in literature. So large is this scene and so far has Johnson traveled in inner space to write it that it is hard to imagine he will ever fully return.

I sure hope he does, with the movie coming out, but he can’t possibly be the same person he was before he wrote “The Name of the World.” It’s a little easier being the reader, the way it always is, and maybe you’ll find your way home better than I did. But something will change: You will be lifted up and set back down. How easy it is to forget, with all the trivia in print cluttering our lives, that words can be this supple a vehicle for transcendent healing.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPEDITIONS ATLAS True Stories of the Adventurers Who Helped Define Our World; Introduction by Peter H. Raven; National Geographic: 310 pp., $40

This luscious history of the world’s great expeditions, from 1888 (the year the National Geographic Society was founded) to the present, is organized by physical frontiers--mountains, glaciers, volcanoes and caves, polar climes, space and the deep sea--and by intellectual frontiers--archaeology, physical anthropology and primate studies. Each has its Jane Goodalls and Edmund Hillarys, but it’s the frostbitten, hypothermic, sun-scorched explorers you may not have heard of that make this not only the most thrilling book of the summer but also the most inspiring. Robin Lee Graham was 16 in 1965, when he set out from California to circumnavigate the globe, solo, in a 24-foot sloop. Anne Cary Maudslay, fully parasol-ed and riding sidesaddle, set out to decipher Mayan inscriptions in Guatemala in 1894. And of course, there’s Jane Goodall, wide-eyed and pony-tailed.

Some of us will luxuriate in the maps alone. The photographs vary from formal to candid, familiar to unfamiliar, black-and-white and color, all poetically captioned. Many of them reveal explorers in the moment of victory or discovery or safe return. Their faces speak volumes and exude confidence: They area tesimony to the virtues of curiosity.