Jane Hamilton writes lovely, thoughtful books about trying to take life as you find it, dealing realistically with harsh, immutable truths and surviving in spite of them. In her first novel, The Book of Ruth, the main character learns to transcend the dismal future that her abusive family history portended. In A Map of the World, a moment of neglect results in the death of a child, and the woman who is responsible must learn to live with herself.

In The Short History of a Prince, Walter McCloud is faced with a double whammy: the death of his brother and his own homosexuality. Walter is 15 years old on the day this novel starts, the day his older brother’s illness is discovered. Daniel will die of it about a year later. And Walter is agonizingly aware that Daniel is the heterosexual son, the one who’d have produced grandchildren for his parents, the one who’d have stayed close to home. Home where to find it, how to get there is and remains the big issue in Walter’s life. Home is where Walter imagines he might achieve a sense of belonging whether it is in his parents’ comfortable Midwestern suburb or at his mother’s family’s country estate at Lake Margaret, passed down through several generations. But even at 15, Walter knows he is never going to fit in, nor is he likely to realize his dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Passion and drive, intention and ambition, hope and hard work are not enough. There are some truths like death, lack of innate talent, and homosexuality that resist all attempts at manipulation, and Walter confronts several of them.

Neglected by his grieving parents, brokenhearted over his first love affair, humiliated, guilt-ridden, Walter leaves for New York, where he goes to college, finds a “career” working in a dollhouse store, and attempts to satisfy himself with a series of short-lived sexual relationships.

But 23 years later, Walter, now in his mid-thirties, is forced to concede it isn’t working for him. “A friend had dragged him to the Y, to a seminar on taking charge and living in the moment, but the theories and techniques were suspect, Walter thought. The moment, after all, was a flash in the pan. Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.” Almost reluctantly, Walter begins to reflect and make changes.

He gets his teaching certification, and accepts a job back in the Midwest, where, he knows, his sexual orientation will have to stay hidden. He attempts to forge a relationship with his much younger sister, born after Daniel’s death, who, with her tract house, car-salesman husband, and generic toddler, seems to him frighteningly conventional. He learns to teach literature to mostly uninspired adolescents, and he makes awkward stabs at finding a significant other.

Through all of this, he is bolstered by only a few reassuring constants: his friend Susan, with whom he’d studied ballet; his parents; and the house at Lake Margaret, which is in danger of being sold off. In fact, it is in dealing with that looming catastrophe that Walter starts to pull himself together, to begin making decisions about what has value and what does not.

Not a lot happens in this novel, and often what does happen seems to happen offstage. But somehow Walter’s dilemma, his struggle to find a place for himself in the world, is rendered so vividly that by the last sentence, in which is expressed the smallest, most fragile tendril of hope, an entire world of possibility has been envisioned, and the hope belongs not only to Walter but also, passionately, to the reader.

Reviewed by Nan Goldberg.

Edith Reardon, looking back at her childhood through the lens of years, says she once thought that everyone in her family had to be good in order for any one of them to be good. She knows better now.

"If you get mixed up in something just happening, you can get submerged or you can get raised up. With or without your being good. Sometimes your skill can help, but sometimes what’s happening is just too big for your little dog-paddle efforts."

It’s 1979 in Charlottesville, Virginia. A rip-tide is about to surge through Edith’s family. Mike and Joss Reardon, parents of Edith and her sister Nora, are at the center of a volatile group of intelligent and talented friends and family members. Mike is a Jesuit-educated lawyer in his forties, a former congressional staffer, whose knowledge of history, religion, politics, and art is formidable, but to his family, often stultifying. Joss, an experimental film maker, is a punster par excellence and a dedicated mother with the temper of a virago.

The narration of The Half-life of Happiness by the author of the excellent Spartina, winner of the 1989 National Book Award, alternates between the point of view of Mike and that of daughter Edith. From both we hear of Mike’s realization that his wife has fallen in love with a woman — the fiancee of one of the family’s group of friends. Mike, furious about Joss’s affair, decides to funnel his rage into a run for Congress.

The pacing of The Half-life of Happiness is slow up to the point of Mike’s realization and decision, but the contrasts between the public image of Mike’s family and the private truth, as well as between Mike’s viewpoint (at the time) versus Edith’s (looking back), are among the triumphs of this book. The reader is both inside and outside the story simultaneously.

Mike himself — with his particular mesh of loyalties and flirtations, great ideas and flaws — is another of the strengths of this book, as is Edith’s unsparing but loving assessment of her parents, their friends, and their times. Notable also is author Casey’s sense of comic timing, best seen in Mike’s hapless encounters with the daughter of his political opponent. The writing throughout is sharp, witty, fine.

It’s Edith who makes sense of it all, understanding as she does, ". . . that the last scene of certain happiness becomes the first scene of uncertainty." And brief is the interval between "the alarms and sadnesses of childhood" and "the first squeeze of perspective toward your vanishing point."

Fruit trees and family trees intertwine in The Family Orchard, Nomi Eve’s semi-autobiographical novel that traces a fictional Israeli family from the early 19th century to the present. The title refers to the family business: growing citrus.

The Family Orchard treats the reader to characters like Avra, a lovely compulsive thief who doesn’t keep her booty, but artistically relocates stolen objects into humorous contexts. We also meet Miriam, an activist who trains in grenade throwing well into her second pregnancy. Spanning almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries in Israel, The Family Orchardtouches significantly on Jewish history in other parts of the word as well. Readers see the Holocaust, not close up as in much recent fiction, but from a great distance. Instead of seeing the victims of genocide, we read about the Haganah, the Israeli underground movement that helped European Jews flee Europe by immigrating illegally to Israel. We read about surviving cousins finally located after a long search and brought to Israel. The greatness of The Family Orchard lies not in its politics, however, but in its exploration of family psychology. How can one couple maintain a lifelong passion while, in the next generation, a secret tragedy makes irreparable tears in the fabric of happiness?

Eve leads you through this family saga in much the same way children are led through the family album, one page, one couple at a time, until the photos become familiar those of the current generation. The early chapters, about distant ancestors, capture the way families mythologize their roots, blending known fact with powerful faith. By inserting herself directly into the last pages of her novel, without even changing her name, Eve inventively challenges conventions concerning the separation of fiction and autobiography. Families rarely observe those conventions in the way they pass on ancestral stories from one generation to the next, and Eve gives us a novel based on that flagrant blending of truth and poetry.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.