5 best: Pete Dexter on fiction about families

1. The Complete Stories. Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. SS O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39, leaving behind two novels, the material for two books of nonfiction and 32 short stories—perhaps half the stories close to perfect. A prime example is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a family heading from Atlanta to Florida on vacation. The husband and wife ("a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage"), their three children, a grandmother and her cat are not far into the trip before an accident (startled cat, clawed driver) sends the car into a ditch. Another car comes along, but the would-be rescuers turn out to be three escaped convicts. Then comes one of fiction's great revelatory scenes, when the grandmother, even as the other members of the family are being led off into the woods and executed, bargains for her life with the convict called The Misfit. The grandmother, too, will soon be dispatched—but not before her pleading turns into a religious discussion. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit says, once she is dead, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'' As this mesmerizing short-story collection shows, O'Connor's tales—many of them about families and distant relations— seem to have come to her built-in with such scenes and lines and characters.

2. Edisto. Padgett Powell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. FIC Powell

Here's why—I imagine—J.D. Salinger has never come out of hiding. From the moment "Catcher In the Rye" was published in 1951, every novel written about a precocious kid found some critic erroneously calling it the best book about precocious youth since "Catcher in the Rye." Then one day in 1984 Salinger—again, I'm imagining—had the bad luck to pick up "Edisto," by a young man called Padgett Powell, who had never written a novel before, and the next day the old recluse woke up feeling like Floyd Patterson the morning after his first fight with Sonny Liston. What Salinger would have seen when he opened "Edisto" was what Patterson saw when he looked across the ring into Liston's baleful eyes: the real thing. It's not just anybody, after all, who can write a believable novel about youthful brilliance. "Edisto" is the story of a 12-year-old named Simons Everson Manigault, whose sophisticated-beyond-his-years tone can't disguise how unfathomable he finds the adult world. The mysteries begin with his mother—or "the Doctor," as he thinks of this haughty college teacher—and his father, or "the Progenitor," who is no longer with the family. A mysterious stranger soon becomes the boy's surrogate father, teaching him about life using "one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience." Padgett Powell is a writer of strange and original gifts. I just can't get over how little attention he receives from the thumb-suckers who sit around bemoaning the state of the arts in America.

3. Straight Man. Richard Russo. Random House, 1997. FIC Russo

The story of William Henry Devereaux, Richard Russo's middle-age university professor, begins with a remembrance of how, as a boy, he had begged his parents for a dog for years and then he finally got one. Devereaux's father, a well-known literary critic not interested in dogs or kids or, in the end, his wife, shows up one afternoon with an ancient Irish setter, who limps into the kitchen five minutes after arriving and dies. As his father buries the dog, Devereaux suggests naming it Red. His father looks at him in disbelief—name a dead dog? "It's not an easy time for any parent," muses Devereaux, "this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name." Russo's access to the pulse of family attachments can make it all too easy to overlook the power of his great comic novels, like the hugely entertaining "Straight Man."

That is overrating it.

4. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories. Norman Maclean. U. Chicago, 1976. FIC Maclean

The writing just drops on you out of a tree. Norman Maclean (1902-90), a revered Shakespeare professor at the University of Chicago, published only two books, one an account of the 1949 smoke-jumping tragedy in Montana's Mann Gulch and the other this one, a 104-page novella about two brothers, their father and the mysteries of family love. For the entire length of "A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories," Maclean sustains a voice so precise and beautiful that it becomes part of the story itself—as fundamental and natural to what is here as the characters and the trout-fishing rivers where matters of love and attachment settle out into time. Here's the narrator, one of the brothers, on the devastating moment when a big fish gets away: "The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken's neck." In the end, it's the voice that stays with you, long after the particulars of the story have mingled with other stories and faded away—a reminder of the consequential things that measured, dead-accurate sentences can be.

5. Rhine Maidens. Carolyn See. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981. FIC See

This explosive, driven little novel—which makes you feel, almost as soon as you begin, that it's slipping through your fingers too fast—could well be the most explicit, reasonable description of the craziness of women ever written. I'm not referring to the specific craziness of specific women— which is here, too, and beautifully done—but to a general condition: that wild, random windsock blowing somewhere out there. Carolyn See's novel is built around two women. The mother is in late middle age and bitter, so thoroughly disabused of all happiness and hope that even the idea of them makes her physically sick. The daughter, 20 years younger, has two unremarkable and unlikable children and a similarly unremarkable and unlikable television screenwriter for a husband. The daughter can see for herself who she married but is nevertheless scared to death of losing him. Many writers experience a period of bereavement after they finish a novel—not as bad as your dog dying but bad enough. Finishing "Rhine Maidens" did that to me, just as a reader.

—Mr. Dexter, whose novel "Paris Trout" (1988) won the National Book Award, is the author, most recently, of "Spooner."