DISCOVERIES

AGAINST THE TIDE: The Fate of the New England Fisherman; By Richard Adams Carey; (Houghton Mifflin: $23, 382 pp.)

Surely you’ve noticed that in the last two years, many of your friends (computer programmers, pharmacologists, stewardesses) have been reading books about fish and fishing. This trend began with “The Perfect Storm,” went on to “Cod” (a book so full of facts that it would drive a journalist to poetry) and will come gracefully to its final resting place, I predict, with “Against the Tide,” an American tale of bounty, greed and the demise of an industry and a culture that also conjures glimmers of hope for the fishermen of New England. Richard Carey, whose previous book, “Raven’s Children,” chronicled life among the Yupik Eskimos in Alaska, includes just enough history to give a reader faith in the natural cycles that drive fishing industries and in human nature to restrain itself. Perhaps too much faith. He makes a great effort to understand and convey a fisherman’s complicated brand of conservationism, which most environmentalists would benefit from understanding. On top of that, he’s a fine writer, with passages like the one in which he remembers why he fell in love with the ocean, lying in bed in a summer house on the Long Island Sound listening to the foghorns: “They set me all in motion, set my bones rocking somehow, as though my bunk were a cradle set loose on the sea. The horns spoke of vast distances, of great errands, of hidden portents, of inarticulate sorrows. . . . The sea was a theatre of dreams.” If you’re going to learn about one of the great enterprises upon which this country was founded, you might as well have an author who can evoke the smell of the sea and a hunter’s love for the animal he hunts as well. “A mild southeasterly breeze was blowing off Nauset today,” Carey writes, “and the water was scalloped by spoonfuls of gladdening light.”

THE FORCE OF CHARACTER: And the Lasting Life; By James Hillman; (Random House: 218 pp., $24)

James Hillman, author of “The Soul’s Code” and the controversial “Re-visioning Psychology,” has now written a book that makes character the ring you reach for on the merry-go-round of aging. It’s better this way--to focus on character rather than on soul because character is more like a project one can work on, a sculpture or a canvas on which the body transforms bad things into good. The soul so often sounds like a precious core that must be fed and watered just right, lest it light out for the territory looking for a better home. Hillman offers “imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves.” “The dysfunctions of aging,” he insists, “convert to functions of character.” Oddly enough, this is a book that will comfort someone afraid of getting old. Its gentle messages shine though, even though its structure and presentation are a bit addled.

WHEN WE WERE WOLVES: Stories; By Jon Billman; (Random House: 230 pp., $21.95)

These stories, set in the American West (Utah, Wyoming and South Dakota) are not so much about how to live, as many stories are, but about what to put up with and what to refuse. Characters in the collection, dog mushers and firefighters (the author is himself a firefighter) don’t have a whole lot of time for navel gazing. They negotiate weather and money and wild animals and Freemasons and Mormons in their daily lives, and with Jon Billman’s fast writing, it can be as dizzying as a galactic battle in a “Star Wars” movie. You feel, as you read, that things are being hurled at you, and you can either duck or receive them: “The storm,” Billman concludes one story, “rolled eastward across the prairie, onto Faith, with the sound of a thousand horses racing to the river, and the wheat was beaten with hailstones the size of baseballs.” It is language, much like Annie Proulx’s descriptions of her American West, that really packs it in, that in a single phrase can describe the landscape, culture, history and politics of an area while conveying a smell and perhaps a sense of hopefulness or despair. In “When We Were Wolves,” he describes Wyoming as “an orange and atomic promised land,” a phrase that speaks to the marrow of the West.

SOUL MURDER REVISITED; By Leonard Shengold; (Yale University Press: 328 pp., $35)

Leonard Shengold’s last book, “Soul Murder: Child Abuse and Deprivation,” published in 1989, was one of the classics that fueled debate on child abuse, recovered memory and the lasting effects of childhood trauma. The phrase, “soul murder,” itself so like a curse, was originally used by Ibsen and Stindberg to mean “the destruction of the love of life in another human being.” Shengold writes that this murder “tends to destroy the child’s capacity for joy and inhibit the power to care and to love.” One of the most troubling aspects of childhood trauma and soul murder--which hasn’t changed in 10 years--Shengold repeats, is the necessity for the child “to turn for rescue to the very person who abused--a mind splitting operation.” In this volume, Shengold revisits a subject whose focus--the claims of childhood abuse--has shifted in the last 10 years from shock and concern to outright suspicion. One of his main concerns in this volume is how to treat patients who are victims of soul murder. “We cure through love,” he writes in a section called “Caritas.” “Love for the analyst-therapist makes it possible for the patient to accept as his or her own insight the analyst provides and evokes.” If the last book you read on psychology was written by Freud or Jung, you ought to check in with Shengold, one of the unsung pioneers.

LAWNBOY; By Paul Lisicky; (Turtle Point Press: 374 pp., $13.95)

Here is a novel of soul murder in the ‘burbs, a niche of fiction large enough to warrant its own section and end cap at Barnes and Noble. If only one could read these novels before adolescence, one might avoid decades of trauma. Against the prima facie decadence of the Florida landscape--palms and bogs and malls and money--17-year-old Evan falls in love with his parent’s fortysomething neighbor, William. Evan’s parents won’t let him come back, even for a visit, after he goes to live with William. He is made to feel as though he has crossed a line and entered an entirely separate culture. He must revisit and repudiate everything from his childhood: his mother, his father, his brother, his education. And yet, the world he peers into--sex parties, gay bars, friends who die of AIDS, hidden affection, is not a world he wants to march boldly into either. Paul Lisicky conveys the sweetness and lostness of a boy, and the senselessness of making him choose between extremes.