The Undertaking.

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when it gives me the acutest pleasure to stay indoors, turn up the air conditioner, put Wagner or Sonny Rollins on the CD, and read. Picnics, by me, are disappointed brunches; and the beach? Later, Jim. (I once spent a summer on Saint Thomas, and if not for Wallace Stevens, Graham Greene, and that blessed device the dry martini, might well have gone stark mad.)

You disagree, of course: that's okay. Sei gesund, believe you really enjoy the sun and sand, the sailboat, the ham and potato salad consumed amid the amber waves of grain, whatever. But you're going to need to take along something to read, right? A book to center and humanize the otherwise mute landscape you're partying in. And here are four grand ones, alphabetically by author, for your Wordsworthian junket. (And that they all are grand is the only quality they share.)

Since 1988, the poet and critic David Lehman has overseen an invaluable series, the Best American Poetry for each year, each one consisting of seventy-five poems selected and introduced by a distinguished poet. And now we have The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-97 (Scribner, $15, 383 pp.), seventy-five poems from that really rather wonderful decade, selected and introduced by literary critic Harold Bloom.

The collection, altogether, is as gorgeous and spirit-raising as the individual poems (of which, to date, I've read only about half: this book alone, perused with the proper attention, is a summer's work - or a summer's joy). It's radiant, clarion proof that for all its commercial invalidity and, worse, for all its devaluation by the politically correct academic establishment, poetry in America continues to thrive. And the collection's value is only enhanced by Bloom's introduction, in which he again - he's been doing this for a while - savages the hypocrisies and mediocrities of the politicized "professors" of "literature" whose loathing and fear of the very subject they claim to teach is turning our universities into bad, not-funny-at-all, jokes.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, is a joker, and a damned good one. I've written about him before in this magazine and elsewhere, and I stand by my man (pace Tammy Wynette), still insisting that he's tout court our best and most bound-to-be-remembered writer of fantasy (fantasy in a Kenneth Graham-Lord Duennas-Testator sense, of course, not the sword-and-sorcery paperback tariff that currently chokes the shelves at Waldenbooks). Neverwhere (Avon Books, $24,337 pp.) is his first solo novel, based on a miniseries he did for the BBC last year, and it's stunningly melodramatic, hilarious, and humane - usually all at the same time.

Richard Mayhew, a drab little man working in London at a drab little job with a drab little fiancee, one night commits a random act of charity, helping a wounded little girl he comes across. But the little girl is actually a princess of faerie, and for his good deed Richard finds himself lost to the "real" world and transported to faerie where he accompanies the lady on a dangerous quest to find the being who has killed her whole family, transforming him from twit to hero on the way. This is the iron rule of all quest-romances, and it's ever-fresh. But Gaiman's brilliant conceit here is to make the landscape of faerie the tube stops of the London Underground: but the "real" Underground, beyond time, where noble talking rats, comic / sinister Victorian assassins, ancient kings, and one fallen angel all blend into a dance leading toward a typically Gaimanesque, which is to say unexpected but perfectly satisfactory, conclusion. Gaiman's signal talent has always been to take the cliches of myth and turn them back into the fecund archetypes they really are. And he just keeps getting better.

Thomas Lynch is not a fantasist. He's that most, when you think about it, scariest of realists, a poet. Even more scarily - hell, offputtingly - he's a funeral director. I would never have bought his collection of essays, The Undertaking (Norton, $23, 202 pp.) my own. But my friend, Father Ben Hogan, sent me a copy. And even then (sorry, Ben) I wouldn't have opened it - prose by an undertaker? Get out! - except one bored morning in the office I read the opening paragraph. I finished it twenty-eight hours later.

Lynch may be one of the wittiest and most wryly confessional writers I've encountered recently. There's his obsession with his Irishness, his problems with booze, his dust-up marriage, his embalming of his own father. The bizarre life-stories of the folks he's known, sometimes loved, and often buried, are all, with no apparent reticence at all, the stuff of this rambling meditation on the awful, the more awful because it's so banal, inevitability of death - and on the absurd dignity that inevitability bestows on life, lived however foolishly it may be. At one stellar moment in the book, discussing his ambiguity about belief in a God, Lynch admits that for him, if the transcendent exists at all, it exists in the power of language to forge for us a meaningful universe that the universe doesn't give us. And that's just what his own language does in this strange and rather wonderful book, as if he were Samuel Beckett in a really good mood. I haven't previously encountered any of Lynch's poetry, but I am now going to make sure that I do.

As with Lynch, I hadn't come across Guy Vanderhaeghe's work until I was sent a review copy of his novel, The Englishman's Boy (Saint Martin's Press, $24, 333 pp.). And as with Lynch, it is now my intent to read everything by him I can find.

Winner of the 1996 Governor General's Prize for Fiction in Canada, the book is so extraordinarily fine, resonant, and passionate that I can only think of names like Fitzgerald and Faulkner to intimate its strength. It may be the definitive novel about our own definitive myth, the myth of the Old West. And its narrative texture, its blending of various times, is as rich as very old Port.

The narrator, Harry Vincent, writing in the early fifties, tells how, as a title writer in Hollywood in the early twenties, he was hired by an eccentric millionaire producer/director to research an epic film of the Old West and interview an aging ex-cowboy stunt-man ("the Englishman's boy" that was) for background. Harry discovers that the "boy" had participated in a genocidal raid on Indians toward the end of the nineteenth century, which had ever after scarred his own self-respect. Reporting this to the millionaire, Harry finds that the mogul doesn't really care about the truth of the West, but wants rather to make a protofascist film that will transform that shameful tale of carnage into a visionary saga of the triumph of virile white civilization over the unenlightened primitives of the New World. Harry objects, the old cowboy objects, but the producer holds all the bucks.

And the finale is - don't worry, I won't tell you - simply untellable: Heart of Darkness meets The Great Gatsby and forms a threesome with Day of the Locust. This may be the most grown-up tale ever about America's glorious and suicidal penchant for reinventing (and thereby annihilating) its own past. If you read nothing else at the beach, the lake, or the mountains this summer, read The Englishman's Boy.

Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, avoids the blandishments of California's natural beauty by teaching English literature indoors at the University of California, Santa Barbara.