A Whole New Life.

In my late twenties I worked at the Children's Hospital in Boston. I spent a lot of time with children who were never going to become grown-ups - and they knew it. I still remember some of those boys and girls; I remember the physical agonies they endured as one or another kind of cancer made its claim upon them, and I remember the fear, the apprehension, the sadness that they felt and tried to express in their often indirect ways. I especially remember an eleven-year-old named Madeleine, called Maddy by all her kin and friends, who was waging a losing battle with leukemia. Toward the end of her life she asked her parents, her older brother, please to call her by her full name; and she went further - she wrote it again and again on a note pad she kept nearby her hospital bed. She also wrote various brief statements about herself; I've long forgotten most of them, but one has stuck fast to my memory: "I had a nice time here most of the time. I'll be going soon: Good-by." She signed that poignant, resigned statement, and dated it. Even now I can remember her looking at me as I read it, then looking at me as I tried to keep looking at her - silence the only way we could both keep away tears.

I go back now to that long-ago time because each of the four recently published books that I recommend here somehow connects in my mind to Madeleine and her way of taking on life's unnerving (sometimes terrible) mysteries. Ian Frazier's Family (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $23, 400 pp.), is, in its own way, an effort of a wonderfully gifted and knowing essayist to tackle the same great imponderables young Madeleine contemplated. For her, time meant less than a decade; for Frazier, time goes back hundreds of years - to his ancestors and their struggle to be Americans, then to build up a strong and sound life for themselves and their descendants. His book is, in part, an extraordinary social history of our nation, told through a narration of one family's fate. But an exceptionally talented writer manages something else, too - an implicit challenge to the very nature of our human mortality. Yes, we all go into the dark; yet his book gives a life to generations of men, women, children: they are handed to us as companions by one of their own, their record a collective new life. Memory will, of course, fail them - particular readers die. But Ian Frazier has done his imaginative, sensitive best to enlarge our present world with that of others who have, like Madeleine, said good-by - and now, reach out to touch us mightily.

In a similar vein, two Southerners speak to us of their lives, ask us to remember the suffering they have experienced, the losses sustained, the victories nevertheless won. Ruthie Bolton is a pseudonym for a black resident of Charleston, South Carolina, who has given us her autobiographical Gal (Harcourt Brace, $19.95, 279 pp.). She is an ordinary working woman of no formal education who has a story to tell - though unlike so many of us, she also has the determination to do so, and the talent to give narrative shape to what she has seen, experienced. In that last regard, she was obviously helped enormously by the novelist Josephine Humphries, also a resident of Charleston, who generously agreed to meet with her regularly, encouraged her to make a record of her memories and reflections. The result is a book that gives one a great deal of pause: Here is a woman who has endure terrible pain, suffered innumerable betrayals, lived at the very edge of things - and yet the voice that engages us is shrewd, compassionate, sensitive, morally awake. Whence her strength of character, of soul - we who have been given so much more in life keep wondering.

Not that suffering and vulnerability don't descend (out of nowhere) on all of us - as Reynolds Price's memoir of his bout with a potentially fatal spinal cancer certainly reminds us (A Whole New Life, Atheneum, $20,213 pp.). He is, as always, a marvelously humorous, sharply observant writer, whose fiction and nonfiction, both, have been an important part of our reading for many years. Now, he tells of an illness, and a response to it - the strength of will it prompted as day by day he came to terms with the new circumstances of his life (he is confined to a wheelchair). As with Madeleine, illness has urged someone to take stock of what his life means, where it is headed; and so doing, he emerges stronger than ever in certain respects. His writing life has flourished, even as he obviously can't get around as he once did. This book has much to offer all of us who someday, in some way, will come upon those fateful (and fearful) moments that will tell us a lot about who we are.

Of course, fiction, too, can bring us such moments: the spell of revelation woven by great storytellers such as Reynolds Price - and too, Dr. Ethan Canin, whose recent The Palace Thief (Random House, $21, 205 pp.) earns him comparison with Chekhov, the greatest writing physician of them all. Three of the four long stories in this collection are told in the first person, not an easy writing strategy; thereby, we get close, indeed; to these somewhat puzzled and fragile souls, each trying so hard to make sense of a particular life's circumstances, events. The writer who has created those characters knows how to bring wisdom to us - the kind that, ironically, comes from frustration and pain. Again, Madeleine's lonely struggle with life's fickle nature returns to me, decades later, as I meet the various kinds of loneliness a tremendously gifted storytelling physician explores so thoughtfully.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard University. Among his many books is The Spiritual Life of Children.