BRIEFLY NOTED.(Get a Life)(The People's Act of Love)(A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York)(Two Lives)(Book Review)

Get a Life, by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $21). At first, the title of this novel--a glib phrase, usually followed by an exclamation point--seems slightly off-key for Gordimer, a Nobel laureate and an activist. But Gordimer has always found the ominous in the banal. Here she exposes the complacency of politically aware, upper-middle-class whites in post-apartheid South Africa. The central figure is an ecologist who is battling plans for a nuclear reactor when he gets a diagnosis of thyroid cancer; ironically, his treatment leaves him temporarily radioactive. He begins to brood about his marriage to a chipper advertising executive, whom he suddenly sees as a person "who has no need of convictions." Gordimer is more concerned with ideas than with character, and her dense syntax saps feeling from even the most dramatic events. Still, she is capable of the lacerating truth, as when an adulterer muses, "Surely there is a humane principle that lies save if not lives then the good order of life."

The People's Act of Love, by James Meek (Canongate; $24). Thrown together in a remote Siberian village during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, the leader of a sect of Christian castrates and an escaped convict who aspires to be a terrorist revolutionary play out the fatal logic of, respectively, religious and political extremism. Meek expertly renders each man's devotion to the task of securing paradise on earth, and exposes the unsettling affinity between the devout servant of God and the cold, calculating murderer. The higher purpose assumed by Meek's tormented believers is mocked by the novel's subsidiary characters, a lusty village woman and the Jewish lieutenant of an occupying Czech legion. These two are too deeply in love with their fallen world to make "blood sacrifices for things they can't know, like God, or the people."

A Fire ...