DISCOVERIES

Black Olives

A Novel

Martha Tod Dudman

Simon & Schuster: 192 pp., $23

STRANGE little novel -- time stops, the world stops, while Virginia, a late-middle-aged woman living in a small town in Maine, hides in the back seat of her late-middle-aged ex-boyfriend’s Jeep Cherokee. She hasn’t exactly planned this day, but when she sees David (he doesn’t see her) in the local gourmet delicatessen (“ye phony old grocery store”), a “feeling goes through me, like my cell phone’s on vibrate and is going off in my pocket -- like I’m experiencing a minor electric shock.”

She curls up in a fetal position, with his old sweaters, a winter parka, a half-empty box of pretzels. He hops in (“Does he know I’m back here? . . . Is he listening to me breathe?”) and drives off, eventually ending up at his house, where Virginia stays locked in the garage for a while, finally escapes through a window, creeps into the house through the cellar door and wanders through the rooms they shared for 10 years.

Rooms they shared and did not share -- they each kept their own house; they had “dates” once or twice a week and attended family weddings and other such gatherings together.

Virginia was satisfied with this arrangement. She did not want to get embroiled in mortgages and laundry; David wanted more of a shared life. He met someone else and had an affair. After several months, on New Year’s Eve, he broke the news to Virginia, who “found out later, in conversation with other wounded birds, that holidays are popular times for such revelations.”

What it all boils down to is the importance, for the injured party, of forgiveness -- if only for the sake of moving on. And also to the many ways that there is no such thing as moving on. Relationships are not episodic: Fast forward, rewind, frame by frame. In an afternoon. Next day, new life.

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The Wentworths

A Novel

Katie Arnoldi

Overlook: 256 pp., $23.95

VERY often, I take novels that are full of despicable characters way too seriously. I worry that this is how the human race is evolving -- into a bunch of selfish, greedy, perverted and dangerous humanoids. All you have to do is drive around L.A.’s Westside to start wondering whether behind every door is a family of dysfunctional, mean-spirited Wentworths.

Katie Arnoldi’s second novel (after the bestselling “Chemical Pink”) is set in Bel-Air, where the SUV behind you honks if you take too long to make a turn, because the driver is late for her nutritional therapy, her colonic, her yoga or her manicure. (This phenomenon might not be particular to Los Angeles; it seems to obtain in any metropolis where money and good looks are of extreme importance.)

“The Wentworths” may strike readers as something like the television series “Arrested Development” in novel form. There’s Judith, 65, the cold, hard matriarch with a voice “like a bullwhip”; August, the bumbling patriarch, who must have his younger women; elder son Conrad, a nasty and dissolute lawyer; Becky, a carbon copy of her mother; and poor Norman, a cross-dresser who is still living (at age 35) in his parents’ pool house. All of them unlikable. In fact, the only palatable character in the entire book is Honey Belmont, a single mom who has sex with August in return for rent money and her daughter’s preschool tuition.

Bad things happen to the Wentworths, but when bad things happen to bad people -- well, as A.A. Milne once wrote, “What can anyone do?” Let’s just hope that these particular people remain cartoonish, that they never come to life and appear in our rearview mirror.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com