To the afterlife created in Alice Walker’s latest novel, say amen and believe. This place is a spiritual last stop for 200 miles before the Highway to Heaven, complete with redemption’s tools: clear hindsight, unadulterated instinct, forgiveness, and the chance to make amends for eternal peace. And it is from this afterlife that much of By the Light of My Father’s Smile is narrated, with the living and the dead haunting each other in vignettes of lust, transcendent love, self-determination, pain, and elemental human nature. Susannah and June are the daughters of African-American anthropologists who want to observe the secluded and nearly extinct Mundo Indian tribe of Mexico. An agnostic, their father agrees to be a minister and convert the unbelievers in exchange for church funding, moving his family to the tribe’s remote community in the Sierra Madres. By day he preaches Christian stories that he doubts in order to get closer to tribal secrets, while at night he defrocks and indulges his voracious libido with his haughty wife. Nature and the seductiveness of the tribe’s beliefs soon affect 14 year-old June (also named Mad Dog because of her precocious rebelliousness), who falls for the handsome Manuelito. One day, she comes home beaming from her newfound sexual experiences, only to get beaten by her father, who has discovered that she is sleeping with the younger boy. Susannah, the docile and loving daughter, witnesses the beating and is pressurized to choose between her sister’s and her father’s love, while June, reeling from his violence, eventually rejects both him and men in general. June becomes an obese, lesbian academic who searches continually for trust and an authentic sexual identity. Susannah marries a Greek, and later divorces, becoming promiscuous in search of her authentic sexual self. Their dead father haunts both of their explorations, narrating moments from their adult lives with regret and insight into his wrongdoings. But it is not until June and her father meet in this halfway house afterlife that he has the real chance and character to make amends, once he discovers that it is to our knees that we must sometimes be driven, before we can recognize, witness, or welcome our own light. Walker’s vision of death is a forgiving, restorative state, one that has the power to make both the living and the dead and entire tribes and communities whole again. Entwined with the novel’s episodes from life and death are weighty ideas about nature, women’s sensuality, and patriarchal controls over both, presented in a rich, unadorned language as powerful as muscles rippling under brown skin.

Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

An adroit blend of melodrama and literary fiction, Louis Begley’s Mistler’s Exit recycles character types, themes, and settings from his previous novel, About Schmidt. Again, our New York narrator is a wealthy, privileged, supposedly talented old man of acid tongue and heart. Again, too, his long marriage has been a facade hiding an unforgiven sexual betrayal. Still again, a quirky younger woman seizes upon him as her sexual ideal and leaps into his bed, eager and inventive.

But widower Schmidt ran south to make a new life at sunset. Mistler, whose wife is still alive, escapes alone to Venice to settle his head in light of the warning that liver cancer may kill him within months.

Not surprisingly, Mistler’s Exit draws upon Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but there are strong contrasts. Unlike Mann’s wasting hero, Mistler is self-consciously virile. He schemes to sell his advertising agency for a huge sum of money, only slightly concerned that concealing his illness might be sharp practice. He wreaks revenge upon the former Harvard roommate and business partner who once had an affair with Mrs. Mistler. He indulges in various sexual postures and recalls others.

Through Mistler’s recollections and chance meetings with old acquaintances, Begley sums up the man’s emotional life. It is not an especially pretty sight. He apparently came close to alienating his only child, a son who is an academic in California. He is obsessed by his late father’s affair with a luminous if romanticized woman in Paris. He admits his role in his wife’s discontent but moons after a blowsy old bag who rejected him in college.

Between such reflections and his snits about hotel service, Mistler and his adoring young woman eat in his favorite Venetian restaurants and visit his favorite Renaissance paintings. He ponders God’s cruelties while trying to recreate the most precious moments of his past.

Unfortunately, precious is sometimes accurate in a disabling sense. When a smug Mistler amazes his lover with philosophical speculations that would be at home in any college dorm, the reader wonders whether or not Begley entirely realizes the extent of his protagonist’s self-satisfaction and self-delusion. Similarly, the novel’s Manhattan social stratosphere is preposterous. Begley treats as contemporary the world of midtown eating clubs, but he surely knows that exclusivity has long since bowed to the need to swell the rosters to pay overhead, and that raspberries are not always reliable in winter. More importantly, his portrayal of elitist power is several decades out of date.

Reviewers often praise Begley’s precise, measured, well-tailored writing, and Mistler’s Exit is certainly a work of assurance. Is the coldness of the dying Mistler the consequence of his never having slept with the one woman he loved, the paragon who was his father’s mistress? Perhaps. But that is a kind of sentimentality difficult to square with Mistler’s betrayals of old friends and proprietary impulses toward women. Charles Flowers is the author of A Science Odyssey (William Morrow).

Even 14 years after his dazzling debut, Jay McInerney is still the whipping boy for the literary brat pack of the mid 1980s, if only because he’s the only one who continues to publish. Older critics have always seemed preoccupied with pointing out the flaws of his novels. They jeered Bright Lights, Big City because it was brazenly written in second person. They trashed the satiric Story of My Life. They said Brightness Falls was an ambitious failure, and that The Last of the Savages was trying too hard to do too much. And in advance, the criticism from old-guard literati will be that McInerney’s latest, Model Behavior, will be derided for just being too too too stylish, too irreverent, too meta-, too indulgent. With all due respect to my elders, these critics are dead wrong, and Model Behavior continues McInerney’s project to track the arc of a generation reared on television and cynically soured by the excesses of a media culture fixated on glamour and capital. While Brightness Falls and The Last of the Savages don’t have the outright humor of Bright Lights, Big City or Story of My Life, McInerney has returned to comic form in Model Behavior. The gloriously outrageous novel chronicles the lifestyles of the not-so-rich and semi-famous, the characters whose alternating self-love and self-loathing give the New York literary/magazine scene a singular dysfunction. Connor McKnight is having a truly awful time: his model/girlfriend appears to have left him with no explanation, his moody writer friend Jeremy is worried about an upcoming review in the Times, his sister doesn’t eat, his gruff parents are coming for Thanksgiving, and his contract writing fluffy celebrity profiles will most likely not be renewed. Such a set-up allows McInerney to return to the themes and stylistics of his earlier work. He overlays the vodka-doused story of Connor with cheeky pokes at popular culture, using his sardonic pen to skewer the self-anointed beautiful people, revenge-seeking book reviewers, and brash magazine editors. McInerney is sly, mischievous, and sometimes downright nasty as he writes his most trenchant social critique since Story of My Life. It is obvious, though, that he’s having fun, writing short sections that contain everything from e-mail messages to book reviews. These coiled vignettes push the novel’s comedic envelope, but they also demonstrate McInerney’s unfailing desire to play innovatively with structure and form. Despite the numerous digs at anything and everything slick and postmodern, McInerney is a truly human writer, lending his flailing characters a distinctive pathos not normally found in such self-reflexive novels. The bad reviews will come, no doubt. Just don’t believe the hype. Model Behavior helps further cement McInerney’s place among the finest writers working today. Mark Luce is a writer who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Not that it’s a bad thing for your first novel to be a bestseller.

Still, being the author of that front-runner of a book and movie, The Horse Whisperer, just naturally boosts the pressure of expectations on your next one.

Nicholas Evans courts this danger by repeating the general theme of an unorthodox love affair between a man and a woman wholly united in trying to rescue innocent creatures. In the end, he finesses the problem: these people are themselves wounded souls and the animals they work so hard to save are not a gentle domesticated species gone wrong but those most legendarily dreaded of all beasts — wolves.

What’s more, Evans refuses to resort to meat tenderizing.

Actually, I don’t mind moderate anthropomorphism, on the theory that human beings can make no judgments about anything except on the basis of human experience. Nevertheless, Evans gets highest marks for The Loop in allowing wolves to be wolves. With nature’s tooth and claw on full display, you’ll find no feral Lassies here. However, in our time, we can afford to love wolves, and readers of The Loop will find themselves once more following the call of the wild, however it might bemuse our ancestors.

The humans aren’t idealized either. Helen Ross, the 29-year-old wolf biologist called in to investigate Montana ranchers’ allegations of wolf depredation, obsesses about the desertion of her lover. When she meets 17-year-old Luke, the stuttering son of area bigshot Buck Calder, the two are attracted by their common love and respect for all of nature’s wildlife — not to mention their united detestation for the bullying, womanizing behavior of Luke’s father.

Some readers (I’m one) may have their doubts about such a love affair, but these people are not one-dimensional characters. Evans is psychologically sound in his depiction of Luke’s stuttering problem, Buck’s marriage gone bad, and the various motivations of government officials and their rancher opponents.

As for The Loop, well, there is the Loop and then there is the loop. The first refers to what basically amounts to the eternal food chain of nature, "Where once there had been life, now was death. And out of death, thus, was life sustained." The second is a sadistic instrument devised by an old wolf-hunter as a substitute for poison.

Evans likes to play little tricks on readers, often leaving them with an impression that is corrected in the next chapter, usually for the better. His writing is expert, full of nuance and tossed-off imagery ("There was no moon and every far-flung star in the firmament was pitching for the job").

It will come as no surprise if this intelligent, provocative novel wins its own spot on the bestseller list. About both people and animals, Nicholas Evans is an alpha storyteller.

Before you begin Daniel Woodrell’s sizzling Tomato Red, strap yourself into your chair. The story starts with a firing-off-the-line, hell-bent-for-leather sentence that leaves readers breathless, laughing, and begging for more speed. None of this is new for Woodrell, whose five previous novels have garnered wild praise from authors as diverse as James Ellroy and E. Annie Proulx. And there’s a reason: Woodrell relies on corset-tight prose, too-real realism, and one hell of an ear for dialogue as he writes about tough guys and tougher broads, thuggish rednecks and determined drunks who live in gut bucket poor locales. With Tomato Red Woodrell returns to the fictional hamlet of West Table, Missouri, also the locale of his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Here he explores the bonds between Sammy Barlach, an ex-con trying hard to make it as a square john, and the Merridews: Bev, the prostitute/mom; Jason, the stylish son who may be gay; and the indomitable Jamalee, the feisty redhead who wants to use anyone and anything to get out of Venus Holler, West Table’s name for the wrong side of the tracks. Woodrell wanders this territory with complete mastery, capturing the sidelong glances that develop into whispers, the low-rent corruption of small town politics and the downright hostility aimed at Sammy and the Merridews by the authorities and the more upstanding residents of West Table. On the surface, these character are Ozark riffraff, but Woodrell refuses to either romanticize or patronize them. They live fast, drink hard, and skate along the gray area of the law, but they endure the hardships and slights, clutching their dreams when all signs point to nightmare. This amalgam of fatalism and optimism is cut with a delicate balance of violence, humor, and heart. Like Faulkner’s early writing about the Snopes family, Woodrell infuses his story with family and place. The family doesn’t sit around a dinner table and talk about their day, and West Table is not a very attractive place, but it is where Sammy and the Merridews are, so they try to make the most of it. Normally poor white folks are addressed in mocking, derisive and flat tones, but not here. Woodrell paints them fully, transcending simplistic stereotypes to craft characters whose foibles and complexities ring with compassion, fortitude, and authenticity. Noir master Raymond Chandler once said that good prose should be lean, racy and vivid. Like all of Woodrell’s fiction, Tomato Red has these in spades. So sit on the porch, pour some Maker’s Mark over ice, buckle up and let Woodrell’s singular voice carry you right into a glorious Ozark sunset. Mark Luce is a writer in Lawrence, Kansas.