William Pritchard.

William Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College. He is the author of Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts), among other works.

Wilson, England's busiest literary man (novelist, biographer, journalist), has followed his highly entertaining novel of last year, Dream Children, with God's Funeral (W.W. Norton, $25, 385 pp.), a breezy, highly readable excursion through what various literary and philosophical figures, mostly from nineteenth-century England, had to say about "the God-question." Wilson admits he is neither a theologian, philospher, nor scientist, but as a man of letters he has no hesitation in taking them on-from Kant to Darwin, Bentham to Baron von Hugel. Wilson's presentation is old- fashioned: a portrait of the man (or woman); liberal use of memorable anecdotes about him; extracts from his writings showing attitudes toward God, religion, the church, science; then a personal, undispassionate judgment on the critic's part of his subject's contribution and importance. He describes William James's style as "an intelligible, even a chatty [one], laced with amusing asides and jokes," and there is no better description of Wilson's own style, one calculated to annoy-as indeed it has-as much as amuse readers. I found him very good on Newman, Swinburne, even "funny old Herbert Spencer"; less good on writers I admire much more than he does, like Matthew Arnold and Bernard Shaw. Wilson's intemperate judgments contribute to his charm, as they do with Ruskin, on whom he has some vivid pages. What he says about Ruskin applies to himself: "You never quite know which way he will jump."

Sue Miller's fifth novel, While I Was Gone (Alfred A. Knopf, $24. 266 pp.), was respectfully enough received when published earlier this year, yet I don't think this remarkable writer has yet been given her full accord of praise. Her first novel, 1986's The Good Mother, about a recently separated woman and her three-year-old daughter, was a critical success; its first sentence-"The post office in East Shelton reminded me of the one in the little town near my grandparents' summer home in Maine"- set the note of patient, unfancy, locally rooted narration that has been Miller's trademark in the novels that followed: Family Pictures (1990), For Love (1993), and The Distinguished Guest (1995). Miller's particular strength is felt through what Lionel Trilling, writing about The Great Gatsby, referred to as "the poet's voice," which "either gives us confidence in what is being said or...tells us we do not need to listen," and that carries "the modulation and the living form of what is being said."

In While I Was Gone, the voice is that of a woman, Jo Becker, a veterinarian married to a minister, Daniel, mother of three grown children, living in one of those New England towns-"Adams Mills, the Adamses long dead, the mills long burned down." The novel begins in silence, with Jo and her husband fishing together on holiday break. This is the day before "everything began," when Jo's past, particularly her past life in 1968 Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes over her present. The arrival of a key figure from the past into the carefully settled life of Jo and her husband is the catalyst for a complicated sequence of events that precipitates a new and poisonous silence between husband and wife. Characters, place, story, are all treated with Miller's accustomed ease and thoroughness, but always through the totally convincing music of a meditative speaking voice, equally responsive to "life,'' whether it's the life of love, dealing nervously with sensitive children, ice skating, driving a car, or presiding over a family Thanksgiving. There are no great ideas to take away from the novel, in part testimony to her preference for the complex over the simple, her commitment to rendering the weave and texture-above all, the tonality-of the everyday. She has never written better.

The same may also be said about Mary Jo Salter, whose fourth book of poems, A Kiss in Space (Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 96 pp.), is a valuable extension of the combination of writerly craft and human expressiveness evident in her earlier books. Salter is often typed as a New Formalist, and she can do rhyme and stanza with the best of them; but there's nothing pedantic or timid in her procedures. Although she's unrepentantly domestic-inasmuch as she writes poems about her parents, her husband and children, the interior space often figured by one house or another-it's with the sense that these are fragile elements of experience, which begin to disappear even as they are touched. In "A Leak Somewhere" she watches, with her spouse and children, the old Titanic movie on TV (Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb) and after the kids go to bed the couple sense that in their own house "a fine / crack-nothing spectacular, / only a leak somewhere-is slowly / widening to claim each of us / in random order...." It's a strength of statement that fends off bathos. Salter's variety shows up in choice of subjects: a longish poem, in three parts, "Alternating Current," involving Helen Keller, Sherlock Holmes, and other historical figures; a very funny one about an au pair's bewilderment at her American employers (the girl thinks of her father's bakery in the Alps "whenever they pass her a slice of their so-called bread"); a poem about going up in a balloon outside Paris ("Fire-Breathing Dragon"); and a lovely elegy for Louis MacNeice ("Sound Effects"). She has written well previously about her mother, and in this volume "Home Movies" ends touchingly with the mother's "stoneware mixing bowl" figured with hand-holding dancers handed down so many years ago to my own kitchen, still valueless, unbroken. Here she's happy, teaching us to dye some Easter eggs in it, a Grecian urn of sorts near which-a foster child of silence and slow time myself-I smile because she does, and patiently await my turn.

These are poems in which tenderness is inwoven with humor, and where impressive technical ability exists at the service of imaginative sanity.

If you care about American jazz, you can't afford to miss Richard Sudhalter's massive Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-45 (Oxford, $35, 1,072 pp.). Sudhalter, a trumpet player and biographer of Bix Beiderbecke, devotes hundreds of pages to an exploration of the most distinctive (and often undervalued) white musicians of the New Orleans and Swing era. His musicological skills are formidable, but with some ability to read music one can rewardingly follow (it helps to hear the record) his illustrated analyses of solos and soloists. Of particular interest to me were his chapters on Beiderbecke, and on Jack Teagarden and Pee Wee Russell, on the Artie Shaw band of the late thirties and early forties. Sudhalter brings his people and their music wonderfully alive through a combination of anecdote, historical placing, and-above all-the gifted descriptions of how the music sounds.

Finally, there is Evelyn Waugh's The Complete Short Stories (Little Brown, $29.95, 536 pp.), which includes forty or so items collected for the first time. A number of them pass through the mind pretty quickly, but you never know when you'll hit paydirt, as I did with "Excursion in Reality," about a struggling young writer, Simon Lent, employed to make a movie of Hamlet from what the eccentric producer, Sir James Macrae, calls "an entirely new angle." "That's why I've called in Mr. Lent, I want him to write dialogue for us," he tells the assembled. "But, surely," said Simon, "there's a lot of dialogue there already?'' Good point, but not the producer's, who wants a Shakespeare in modern speech since the original is so difficult to understand. Things don't work out, and, after many drastic improvements on the original, Sir James announces "No, it won't do. We must scrap the whole thing. We've got much too far from the original story. I can't think why you need introduce Julius Caesar and King Arthur at all." (They were, of course, suggested by him at the last conference.) The short story wasn't Waugh's ideal literary form, but there are enough golden moments in these to make you forget such a reservation.