Summer reading : Daria Donnelly.

What is it about gliding across steel rails at 60, 70, and soon 150 miles an hour that makes a body so aware of its solitude? Under that press, train riders turn to the strangers beside them, or to those found in books, for what feels like sacred company.

Commuting on the New York-Boston train, I've met three emphatically intelligent companions, forthwith forwarded for your summer pleasure: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (Grove, $11.95, 402 pp.); Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Houghton Mifflin, $14, 254 pp.); and Alan Garner's The Voice that Thunders: Essays and Lectures (Harvill, $24, 244 pp.). These are "countercultural" works, urgently and stylishly arguing back against cultures that distort or threaten our humanity.

Imagine a novel about Pontius Pilate so good, so true, and so beautiful that when Jesus Christ reads it he removes Pilate from Purgatory to Paradise. Bulgakov's Master has authored exactly such a work, under the inspiration of his mistress, Margarita, and to the peril of his sanity. For his pains, he is denounced by a literary critic eager to inherit the writer's Moscow apartment. Stalinism's corruption of literary artists and critics is the broad target of Bulgakov's brilliant burlesque. The novel's theological gloss on life under the dictator (Satan enters modern Moscow to wreak breath-taking wickedness and God's justice) is comedy in the old sense. Think Dante, updated.

Bulgakov is one of Russia's greatest writers, but he was panned, pruned, and largely unpublished in his lifetime. Son of a professor of theology, the beleaguered playwright, novelist, and short-story writer once begged Stalin to exile him. Stalin assented to the writer's second choice, a job at the Moscow Art Theater. Bulgakov's "happiness" there may be surmised by the vignettes in the novel surrounding Satan's stunning performance in one Variety Theater. I won't spoil it, but the Master gets lots of new company at the asylum.

Stalinism, argues Marilynne Robinson in her essay "Puritans and Prigs," reveals the murderousness at the dark heart of social perfectionism, that priggish forgetting of the universal reach of sin she fears is gaining ground in America. Robinson (whose novel Housekeeping is as gorgeous as Larry Breiner suggests above) is a committed Calvinist. In The Death of Adam essays, Robinson seeks to renew interest in the ideas of the now scarcely known French humanist and theologian Jean Cauvin. She argues that Calvin, as he came to be known, had a large hand in shaping American goodness, and that our unjust and uninformed dismissal of his values and ideas has been disastrous for our country and our times. Call it ressourcement, for the allies.

Robinson undertakes her revivalist project in several genres: a testament of faith; hortatory reflections on public matters; historical accounts of Calvin and his circle, as well as those shaped by his legacy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the abolitionists among them. Ironic and sharp, Robinson is at her best when skewering with actual Calvinist history and ideas those most apt to dismiss and embody caricatured Calvinism. Real Puritans, she opines in "Puritans and Prigs," attempted to shape society by faith and reason, in contrast to prigs who are content to announce their opinions and "puritanically" damn all who disagree. Her essay "Family" locates similar ironies in the tendency of family-values fundamentalists to dodge the crucial role that the economy has played in reshaping the family along lines they deplore. These cool attacks on inch-deep politics are great fun, though she spares no one, not even the amused reader.

Robinson's fullest and boldest essay, "Darwinism," deftly uses Scripture to counter not the science of evolution, but the philosophy called "Darwinism," which she argues is poisonous not only to our sense of ourselves and our world, but to our political and social behavior. Though she calls on Darwin, Malthus, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, and Freud to mount her argument, it is her use of biblical verses, along with Albert Einstein's 1932 open letter to Freud ("Why War?"), and William Jennings Bryan's tabled summation at the Scopes trial that make for the most unexpected and persuasive turns of argument. These are the fruit of her intense and wide reading in primary literature. And her faith, which--contrary to elite and popular belief about belief--is intelligent, exacting, and (zounds!) relevant.

Where Robinson is bent on rescuing religious voices in the history of ideas, British novelist Alan Garner has dedicated his life to saving the material and folk culture of his native Cheshire. I've mentioned his essays before [Commonweal, April 7], and bet I will again. Garner's meticulous passions are enthralling. Don't miss the essay on a wooden shovel he carried around for forty years until museum experts finally confirmed his Bronze Age dating. Or the fairy-tale essay which begins with the story of a friend's improvisational service in several armies, and on both sides, in World War II. Or the essay where he measures the severity of an impending bout of depression by his response to the dinosaur fossil on the kitchen floor of his medieval house. His weird (old-sense) writing testifies that you do not have to be an anthropologist, elegist, National Socialist, or New Ager to keep faith with the folk and reject a global cosmopolitanism based on mass culture. There are luminous reflections here on the vocation of writing, on myth, criticism and teaching, archaeology, and mental illness. Garner clings tenaciously to the rural landscape of his ancestors, now lightly occupied by Manchester's urban professionals. There he witnesses to an estranged past, retelling England's most ancient stories.

Daria Donnelly is Commonweal's associate editor.