Amy Welborn

When I was a child, my favorite book was Louis Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. Harriet, in case you don't know, is a scruffy, almost-outcast young girl who spends her time observing people up close and in secret, writing about what she sees, enduring the consequences of her discoveries. I must have read it fifteen times.

Thirty years later, upon giving the book to my daughter, I pondered my attachment to Harriet. The reason became clear. It wasn't that both Harriet and I were writers. I connected with Harriet because we are both, at heart, nosy little girls. Nosiness is underrated. After all, what is it but curiosity about what other people do when they run up against life? And what is good literature but their stories, and what are readers but privileged spies?

Richard Russo garnered a well-deserved Pulitzer for his novel Empire Falls (Vintage, $14.95, 512 pp.) in 2002, but his 1993 Nobody's Fool (Alfred A. Knopf, $14.95, 560 pp.) remains my favorite of his works. It's one of those books I read all or part of every year. Nobody's Fool concerns itself with one Sully--Donald Sullivan--a middle-aged, nearly disabled day laborer in economically depressed upstate New York. On the most superficial level, Nobody's Fool is about a man surrounded by people he has hurt, puzzled, and even, once in a while, helped, in spite of himself. It's closely observed and, at moments, quite funny.

Yet Russo is after more than good humor and careful observation, as he always is. Nobody's Fool brings the reader up close to the way that people live with broken ties and reconciliation, the price of abuse and irresponsibility, and the necessity of forgiveness. I can't think of a modern novel that is filled with such subtle hints of grace, hints that prompt me to examine my own life more carefully to see what I may be missing.

Michael Malone, though, comes close in his 1984 novel Handling Sin (Sourcebooks, $15, 640 pp.). Malone is an interesting character, a bona fide Real Writer with many novels to his credit. He also spent a number of years writing award-winning scripts for television soap operas, most notably One Life to Live. Really.

When it was first published, Handling Sin was universally acclaimed a comic masterpiece, in the picaresque tradition of Dickens, Thackeray, and Cervantes. Not many critics noted, however, that the title harks back to the fourteenth-century Handlyng Synne, by Robert Mannyng, a member of the Gilbertine order, who translated stories illustrating the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins from a lengthy French work in verse, adding tales from English life as he went.

Handling Sin tells the story of Raleigh Whittier Hayes, an uptight North Carolina insurance salesmen whose careful life is shattered, in one short day, by the convergence of a suddenly and inexplicably politicized wife, incomprehensible twin teenage daughters, hapless friends, and, worst of all, an eccentric failed Episcopal priest of a father who has disappeared from his hospital room, last seen in the company of an African-American mental patient, in a big yellow Cadillac, driving away from the bank from which he's withdrawn his life savings, after having left instructions that if he knows what's good for him, Raleigh will perform each of seven strange tasks he's given him and meet him at Jackson Square in New Orleans in a few days' time. A simple story.

Handling Sin is certainly a very funny book, often screamingly so. Still, as the title indicates, the humor and the outrageous situations in which Raleigh finds himself point to something deeper. In his unwilling pilgrimage, he encounters the unpredictable world from which he's tried to isolate himself, finding it full of people who are neither all sinner, nor all saint, but a messy, mysterious combination. Handling Sin comes down to handling life as it is, rather than how we would like it to be.

Speaking of life as it is, the Northern California hippie commune that's at the center of T. C. Boyle's latest novel, Drop City (Viking, $25.95, 464 pp.), gets a taste of just that when, after being threatened by various arms of the law, its members load up the bus and move just south of the Arctic Circle. There they discover what getting back to nature is really all about. Boyle's portrayal of the 1960s counterculture in Drop City isn't idealized in the least--you might even say it's brutal. But it's compassionately brutal, if that makes sense, for his characters are three-dimensional people whom you watch with a kind of horror, dread, and faint hope, as they haul their goats, weed, and half-naked children, named Che and Sunshine, up to the land of six-month-long night.

The exploration of failed, and hardly well-considered ideals, the interactions between the hippies and their realistic, hardy, yet problematic neighbors, and paragraph after paragraph of just-right, yet unobtrusive metaphor make Drop City an absorbing read for summer days, and make this reader deeply grateful that its author is such an excellent spy on the courage and foolishness of the human heart. Just like my good friend Harriet.