BRIEFLY NOTED.(Desertion, Indecision, War Reporting for Cowards, Garbage Land)(Book Review)

Desertion, by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Pantheon; $23). At the heart of this novel, by a writer who has been nominated for the Booker Prize, is an Arabian-inspired tale of two pairs of lovers in the perilous ethnic and political landscapes of East Africa. In 1899, a young English Orientalist gets lost in the East African desert, is rescued by a Muslim shopkeeper in "a crumbling town on the edge of civilised life," and falls in love with the shopkeeper's sister, Rehana. This leads her to a "life of secrets and sin," and the pattern is repeated two generations later, in the forbidden attachment between Rehana's granddaughter and her lover. None of the lovers can overcome the crippling prohibitions against their love. But the affecting story of their failure allows Gurnah's self-consciously erudite narrator to bend their lives into a meditation on African history, estrangement, and loss.

Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House; $21.95). Twenty years ago, Don DeLillo, in "White Noise," created a character so beset by morbid anxiety that she begins taking pills that obliterate the fear of death. In our era of precision-targeted psychotropics, this scenario no longer shocks; it's drearily plausible. For similar reasons, the satirical springboard of Kunkel's first novel--a neurotically aimless New Yorker takes medication that he believes will instill in him the ability to make commitments--is rather creaky. Moreover, the Big Pharma plot only partially masks the fact that this is yet another novel in which a charming, Nick Hornby-style layabout is mechanically cajoled into semi-maturity. Kunkel's narrator has an appealingly rascally voice, and the author is expert at depicting highbrow buffoonery--at an all-night Ecstasy party, flesh and philosophy commingle to hilarious effect--but the book, for all its crisp prose, can't escape the staleness of its conceit.

War Reporting for Cowards, by Chris Ayres (Atlantic Monthly; ...