-- Bernadette Murphy

*The Photograph

A Novel

Penelope Lively

Viking: 240 pp., $25.95

Penelope Lively's fiction has a retrospective cast. Although she is not a historical novelist in the mode of Mary Renault, Barry Unsworth or A.S. Byatt, she is sensitive to the allure of the past. More accurately, however, one might describe her as a historian of individual consciousness, in particular of the role played by memory in shaping it. Her characters move forward by looking backward.

"The Photograph" is one of Lively's most satisfying novels: cleverly conceived, artfully constructed and executed with high intelligence and sensitivity. It is also a surprisingly suspenseful story, with developments unfolding in two directions, as the characters find out new things about a past they thought they knew and as their radically altered perceptions and feelings continue to sway their relationships. Lively has exceeded herself in her portrayal of these characters. Not only has she created a cast of memorably distinctive and believably complex individuals, but she has also succeeded in the subtle and difficult task of showing us how their feelings and conceptions are being transformed, by the revelations about the past and by their ongoing, sometimes painful, encounters with each other in the present.

-- Merle Rubin

*Poets of the Non-Existent City

Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era

Edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak

University of New Mexico Press: 274 pp., $19.95 paper

"Poets of the Non-Existent City" is a homage to an era and a place -- Los Angeles in the decade after the end of World War II -- and to the dedicated few poets who worked to create a decent society during the shameful decade of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. A collection of poetry, prose and graphic arts of the era, culled from the pages of the journals California Quarterly and Coastlines, the book brings together 19 poets representing 13 years in the life of the city.

For those who ask what it was like to write under such circumstances, the answer is contained in this remarkable volume from the University of New Mexico Press, and the answer is nothing short of inspiring. "Poets of the Non-Existent City" is also a very useful book -- a handbook for the maintenance of sanity -- for the poets of today as well as anyone else interested in an honest and accurate use of language in the current storm of lies and deceits. Anyone who thinks the American political climate is the worst it's ever been should have a look. We've got no idea what bad is. With a little help from our friends, we might develop the pluck these writers had.