Affinity
By Sarah Waters
Riverhead Books, 352 pages

Sarah Waters' terrifically entertaining "Affinity" is plumb in love with female swooniness. Its Victorian heroine, Margaret, is forever feeling lightheaded and jumpy, or fighting off the effects of the "draughts" her mother presses on her while she tries to write in her journal. She's not a weakling or a fool, though. She's battling both institutional cruelty, in the form of the women's prison where she pays visits to the inmates, and the strictures society imposes on women, in the form of the domineering mother intent on making her daughter behave as a proper young lady.

Waters -- whose first novel was last year's "Tipping the Velvet" -- writes lesbian Victoriana in which her heroines struggle to realize a place where they can live out their desires. Margaret's desire is embodied by Selina Dawes, a young medium jailed for a disastrous séance that left a woman dead, whom she meets during her prison rounds. The vogue for historical novels makes now an especially good time for a writer like Waters. Her writing is atmospheric and supple enough to glide right past the artificiality of pastiche and immerse us in the period. Occasionally she allows her "point" to come to the fore ("Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?"), but primarily she's a storyteller and a spellbinder.

In the past year some of the most pleasurable novels have come from authors who are writing literary versions of women's romance fiction -- Sebastian Faulks' "Charlotte Gray," Valerie Martin's "Italian Fever" (which is indebted to E.M. Forster as well). Waters unashamedly plunges into Gothic melodrama, and what she comes up with is a rarity: a literate page turner. "Affinity" is a nifty example of the pleasure that a serious writer can still bring to a familiar gaslit form.

-- Charles Taylor

The River King
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 324 pages

Alice Hoffman has a way of sneaking up on you. She expresses herself so simply, and with such unabashed willingness to skirt the edges of "once upon a time," that a reader can be lulled into thinking that hers is a tamer world than it really is. "The River King," Hoffman's 14th novel, is populated with swans and roses, the detritus of fairy tales. But it's also vividly marked by the fallout of class resentments and the cruelties of love gone wrong and youth gone wild.

The sleepy town of Haddan, Mass., is home to an elite boarding school where the ruling class of tomorrow vents its scorn on the townies of today. Into this sharply divided arena wanders an odd collection of social straddlers: Betsy Chase, the school's unhappily engaged photography teacher; Abe Grey, the cop with a dark family past; August Pierce, an amateur prestidigitator who loathes his smug classmates; and Carlin Leander, a beautiful outsider on an athletic scholarship. Their lives begin to collide first in ordinary and then in extraordinary ways in the haunted halls of the Haddan School, and "The River King" boldly takes the reader with them over this strange terrain.

Hoffman glides with ease through potentially hokey matters -- she has a lovely gift for writing about ghosts and karmic retribution as if they were the most natural things in the world. But her work doesn't hang upon spectral photographs or floral-scented phantoms. What Hoffman does masterfully is crawl inside the heads of regular people as they fall in love, grieve and sink into the bitterest loneliness, as they find a place in the world, as they die. She doesn't flinch from the despair of unrequited emotion or the horror of sadistic revenge, nor does she shy away from the giddy glory of love at first sight. In many ways, she's like her own leading man, August, undeniably deft at simple tricks but blessed with a quietly breathtaking gift of true magic as well.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

The Name of the World
By Denis Johnson
HarperCollins, 129 pages

Four years after the death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident, Mike Reed is like a creature suspended in amber. The Midwestern university where he teaches history and attends a string of dinners that end in hot buttered rum sipped before the fire in an atmosphere like that "of a very expensive gift shop" has come to seem oppressive. He can't muster the energy to hold onto his job or to land a new one at a place called the "Forum for Interpretive Scholarship" (the exquisite meaninglessness of that name testifies to Denis Johnson's gift for low-key, sidewise satire): "Is there any limit, I thought, to how boring this place can be?"

Although Reed drifts through most of this slim, piercing novel -- losing his job, taking up with a gambling partner who winds up punching him out in a bar, stumbling into a crush on an uninhibited student who keeps turning up to do wild things in the oddest places -- his inertia hides the fact that he is on the verge of a transformation. It begins when he realizes that even his own grief has lost its initial integrity; he haunts a gallery where he stares at a drawing that "consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines ... at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast, chaotic wanderings."

Concerned with sorrow and the task of continuing in a world riven with loss, where perfection always decays, "The Name of the World" is still often shrewd and funny. Here's how Johnson describes academic leftists: "What they'd mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense." He says in two sentences what it takes the average academic satirist a whole book to say.

Then there's the prose. Johnson is the kind of writer who's so good you don't notice how good he is. There's no effort to reading this novel -- it just sort of slips in, less like reading than breathing in the cool dry air of winter. When you exhale, perhaps with a sigh as melancholy as one of Mike Reed's, the warmth will surprise you.

-- Laura Miller

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"