BRIEFLY NOTED.

The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra, translated from the French by John Cullen (Doubleday; $18.95). Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Israeli Arab, seems fully assimilated into Tel Aviv society, with a loving wife, a successful career as a surgeon, and numerous Jewish friends. But after a restaurant bombing kills nineteen people, and it becomes apparent that his wife was the bomber, he plunges into the world of Islamic extremism, trying to understand how he missed signs of her intentions. Khadra (the nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul) vividly captures Jaafari's anguish and his anger at the fanatics who recruited his wife. The Israelis don't escape lightly, either, as their army marches over law-abiding Arab citizens in an attempt to stamp out the militants. Khadra's writing has a tendency toward cliche, but the book's dark vision of the conflict is powerful.

A Strange Commonplace, by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House; $14.95). One never expects traditional plots from Sorrentino, who has published poetry and fiction since the nineteen-sixties, but one can usually count on wit, vigorous prose, and an unflinchingly bleak take on life. His new novel (the title is taken from a William Carlos Williams poem) is a series of vignettes that present men and women obsessed by the missteps of love, betrayal, and desire. The cast includes a dentist unhinged by sexual fantasies and two brothers, each of whom has an affair with the other's wife, and there is an alarming tale of a man and his homburg. Despite the bleakness, Sorrentino regards his characters with tenderness: "He wished that he could chafe his barely breathing nostalgia into a delicious, a self-satisfied sadness." The novel is divided into fifty-two discrete parts--a dazzlingly original deck of cards.

Stravinsky, by Stephen Walsh (Knopf; $40). The second volume of Walsh's remarkably thorough two-part biography begins with ...