"Dumb Luck" centers on a street-smart urban trickster named Red-Haired Xuan. He is a clever Candide who, far from dodging misfortune after misfortune, bumbles through life's amusing adventures to find that, in fact, every seeming adversity does indeed result in the best of all possible worlds -- for him, at least, while everyone else is none the wiser. The setting is Vietnam in the 1930s, when the country was undergoing enormous social change. The pressures for modernization, for Vietnam's elite to adopt French language, fashion and cultural mores were enormous.

Phung's translators offer a 24-page introduction of meticulously footnoted narrative analysis that painstakingly places the work in context, but it is best read and fully appreciated after reading Phung's fine, funny and still relevant work.

-- Sheridan Prasso

*

Evidence of Things Unseen, A Novel; Marianne Wiggins; Simon & Schuster: 386 pp., $25

Marianne Wiggins is not afraid to announce sky-high ambitions in her bold, breathtaking new novel. The author takes as her epigraph a section about plutonium from John McPhee's cautionary 1974 portrait of a nuclear physicist, "The Curve of Binding Energy," then opens her own narrative with a bravura description of the Trinity Atomic Test Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded: "Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert where the heat of several suns has fused the particles of sand into a single sheet of glass so dazzling it sends a constant signal to the moon." Subsequent chapters begin with quotations from "Moby-Dick," and even as she emulates Melville, enlacing flights of scientific, political, social and philosophical speculation within a stirring human drama, Wiggins' voice remains triumphantly her own. "Evidence of Things Unseen" becomes a love story lit up by the heavens.

With this poignant, realistic portrait of two people who love one another deeply but not equally, Wiggins may have tapped a vein of common humanity that will bring "Evidence of Things Unseen" a wider audience than her earlier work. Such novels as "Eveless Eden" (1995) and "Almost Heaven" (1998) were as ambitious as "Evidence of Things Unseen"; "John Dollar" (1989) was very nearly as accomplished. But it was hard with these books to get beyond Wiggins' savage depictions of human nature and society. By softening the bite of her writing, Wiggins has created a story as compelling as it is devastating.