-- Melvin Jules Bukiet

*Ten Little Indians

Sherman Alexie

Grove Press: 244 pp., $24

It's becoming clearer now that "Indian Killer" was an anomaly in Sherman Alexie's career. In that novel, he expressed Native American rage in a raw, direct form. Abandoning much of the humor of his earlier works, such as "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and "Reservation Blues," he envisioned a Seattle of literary poseurs, shock-talk radio and vigilante injustice, inflamed by a serial killer of white men who scalps his victims. But in the short-story collection "The Toughest Indian in the World," the laughter and tenderness returned -- as it does again in Alexie's new collection, "Ten Little Indians." This doesn't mean he ignores painful issues. It's just that he finds subtler ways of making us pay attention. The darkness of Alexie's subject matter is offset by the exuberance of his storytelling. "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above" -- a son's loving, exasperated memoir about his mother, whose real surname was Miller -- is full of "notes of historical revision," goofy lists and sex tips. "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?" is about a basketball star who gives up the game to honor his parents and, when they die, takes it up again at the impossible age of 40. But it isn't somber in the telling. There's trash talk galore, a funeral oration that can't keep a straight face ("Ay, jokes!") and, at the very heart of the story, a two-page riff about all the characters Frank plays with on public courts as he tries to recapture his game. Too long to quote here, it's a virtuoso piece whose only real purpose is to tell us that, since Alexie is having such a good time, we can have one too.

-- Michael Harris

*The Wife

A Novel

Meg Wolitzer

Scribner: 224 pp; $23

As soon as the women's movement rose up from an atmosphere of longing and resentment, daughters looked over their shoulders and asked their mothers, "How could you have lived the way you did, pretending, biting the insides of your cheeks, making it easy for men to own everything?" Elders like Grace Paley and Dorothy Dinnerstein were out the door with the daughters, raising hell. Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt snickered at feminists who threatened to erase the category of glittering exception in which the two had established their power. Elizabeth Hardwick was so aggrieved by rivalrous female ambition that she published "Seduction and Betrayal," in which, writing about Hedda Gabler, she urged women to find purpose by nurturing the talents of wounded men.