GOODNIGHT STRANGER

By Miciah Bay Gault

301 pp. Park Row. $25.99.

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“Some came to remember the past, or to refuse the future,” remarks Gault’s 28-year-old narrator, Lydia, sizing up the tourists who flock to the Cape Cod island she has called home since birth. Perhaps Lydia is projecting, but she and her brother, Lucas, have some paralyzing nostalgia issues of their own — as former triplets scarred by a grieving mother who fetishized their third sibling’s death in infancy. Lucas now recoils from social interaction, while Lydia has become a helicopter sister, shunning romance and enabling her brother’s pathological shyness. They cohabit by self-medicating with a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone until a handsome stranger named Cole arrives. Like the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini’s “Teorema,” he insinuates himself into their household, upsetting the domestic equilibrium by playing on their vulnerabilities: Lucas anoints Cole as the grown incarnation of their dead baby brother, who was named Colin, and Lydia succumbs to his sexual heat.

So who is this operator?

Gault finesses the mechanics of her puzzle with craft, if not art, oiling the unraveling of Cole’s identity with a Poe-powered tool kit: a crumbling old house, snippets of “Annabel Lee,” witching-hour tapping in the attic, ghosts of syphilitic whores and, for good measure, a disentombment. Left unearthed beneath the spookhouse gambits is an intriguing subtext about the infantilizing hazards of familial devotion. Not for nothing does Lydia conflate her sinister mystery man with that enshrined bedtime story “Goodnight Moon.”

LIFELINES

By Heidi Diehl

320 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

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Louise, the Oregon-reared, Düsseldorf-schooled artist at the nexus of this transcontinental saga, traffics in installations amid highway overpasses and nuclear plants. As Diehl chronicles Louise’s creative and emotional growth from Nixon’s crash-and-burn era to the hope-and-change sunrise of Obama, the political resonances of her site-specific art take a back seat to the personal reverberations of geography and culture. Louise’s youthful German residency is a prison break from her born-again parents and conservative American art training; the migration of her German ex-husband, Dieter, to Brooklyn signals an escape from an upbringing of denial and dissembling. Both remain burdened by the baggage of their respective nationalities well into late middle age, when their dual-citizen daughter, Elke, slogs along in a 30-something’s limbo: single, unemployed and childless.

Diehl’s energies seem most activated by her expats’ feelings of dislocation: “the migrant’s heightened sensation, the smallest things loaded and profound.” But apart from Dieter, all rock-drummer jagged edges, and Louise, a hot mess of indecision, the other characters tend to bland out. For all her musical aspirations, Louise’s other daughter, the American-born Margot, is temperamentally indistinguishable from her corporate, German-born half sister. Though much is made of German inhibition, the one most penned-in by earnestness is Louise’s American husband, Richard. At day’s end, European and Yankee sensibilities blur together. When Dieter, momentarily at sea in Oregon, cringes at a rusted car stranded on cinder blocks in someone’s front yard, you don’t have to be German to feel his pain.