BRIEFLY NOTED.(Mission to America)(The Days of Abandonment)(New York Burning)(The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth)(Book Review)

Mission to America, by Walter Kirn (Doubleday; $23.95). Kirn's satirical novel follows two young men who are dispatched from a cloistered religious community in rural Montana to recruit converts from present-day America. As they gorge on junk food and vapid women, administer a well-being quiz (sample question: "Are you ever aware of your own heartbeat?"), and become in-house counsel for a Colorado mogul, one can clearly discern the author attempting to skewer the consumerism and the spiritual emptiness of contemporary society. But the critique is vitiated by the fact that the community this society is being measured against is so patently silly (young men lose their virginity at a yearly event called "The Frolic"; women read messages from the dead by looking at tree bark), and that the main characters exist only to illustrate the various themes.

The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions; $14.95). In this deeply observed, excruciatingly blunt novel, Olga, a middle-aged wife and mother, is plunged into a breakdown after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. Her anguish is expressed through obscenity and violence, as she neglects her children and day-to-day responsibilities to obsess over what sexual acts her husband and his lover might be performing. Olga's rage and self-pity threaten to turn her into something of a monster; when she hears her daughter crying for her, she thinks, "But why should I hurry? I discovered with remorse that, if the child needed me, I felt no need of her." Still, Ferrante knows just when to let up, and the redemptive note struck by the ending is a welcome reprieve.

New York Burning, by Jill Lepore (Knopf; $26.95). On March 18, 1741, the first of ten suspicious fires broke out in New York City. In the months that followed, eighty-one slaves confessed to conspiring to "set Fire to ...