"I am my own secret now ... my darkest, best-held secret." So said a fictionalized Herman Melville, deep in the long silence at the end of his life, as he is depicted in Frederick Busch's haunting novel "The Night Inspector," published just last year. The many characters in "Don't Tell Anyone," Busch's new collection of 16 stories and a novella, are just as fully engaged, as the book's title suggests, in the quiet containment of truth.

Busch has shifted scenes from the shadowy wharves and gaslit bordellos of Melville's Manhattan to 20th century New York state, upriver from the big city, predominantly in and around what one character calls "what's left of Dutchess County." Here live people like Bob, the narrator of "Bob's Your Uncle," who shuttles every workday between his office in Manhattan and, just up the Henry Hudson Parkway, a home life that can be changed in an instant by the revelation of one long-dormant piece of information. The emotionally disturbed son of an old friend of Bob's wife -- a married woman with whom Bob long ago had a secret and profoundly affecting fling -- suddenly appears on his doorstep. Before long, the energy of the boy's imploding family, a force that has propelled him to seek refuge with his "uncle" Bob, will strip away the wrapping on Bob's old secret adultery and send his marriage over the cliff.

There's as much adultery and denial going on in the Hudson River towns of Busch's bittersweet stories as ever was found in Cheever country, just slightly downriver and 20 years further removed in time. And like Cheever, Busch is an immensely intelligent and insightful writer. His dry sense of humor shows itself when a character describes a moment of awkward praise from his father: "He smiled at me as if I had done something noteworthy. That was why he was such a good junior high school principal. He discovered about eleven times a day that people were commendable, and they knew he thought so."

Melville may have held his secrets close to the vest, but the people in Busch's stories seem almost uniformly to settle for something less successful, but far more real. In the story "The Talking Cure," Peter, who finds out about his mother's affair with a local veterinarian, says of his father: "For the rest of the years of my life at home, I feared his deciding to tell me. He mercifully didn't." As in life, where most family secrets are a form of common knowledge kept, by unspoken agreement, just under the table, the characters in "Don't tell Anyone" yearn not so much to change the past but to keep it in its place.

-- Edward Neuert

The Family Orchard
By Nomi Eve
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages

Family stories, by definition, can't belong to a solitary teller; to survive, they must be filtered through more than one consciousness. Nomi Eve's debut novel, "The Family Orchard," riffs on this theme as it chronicles six generations of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe, Israel and the United States. The book is written in two voices: Sections headed "I write" are the work of a woman named Nomi, while her father, Eliezer, contributes shorter sections headed "My father writes." Nomi's stories of her ancestors' lives are at times presented in the enchanted, sensual language of fable. In a different typeface in inset boxes, her father relates the hard facts -- dates, historical details, political history -- in a direct, brass-tacks style.

The two streams of text are potentially a distracting gimmick, but it worked for me, making "The Family Orchard" feel modern and age-old at the same time. By now, the similarities between hypertext and ancient texts with commentary (such as the Talmud) are obvious, and it's enjoyable to read a book that simply puts the device in play, without pretension or tedious self-consciousness. After all, one of the messages of the novel is that what's old often becomes new again, especially when it comes to family history.

In the stories themselves, family traits are passed on through the generations in subtle and overt ways. Nomi's great-great-great-grandmother, Esther, has an appetite for out-of-bounds sex and carries on a secret relationship with the neighborhood baker throughout her marriage. She dies giving birth to a son, who becomes immersed in an illicit passion with his stepsister. Eventually they are found out and allowed to marry. ("Imagine, a father and son married to a mother and a daughter!" writes Eliezer.) Nomi's grandmother, Miriam, is an accomplished needlewoman who "sewed stories into her cloth," a precursor to her story-weaving granddaughter. And so on.

Once the family is established in what will become Israel, their livelihood is citrus growing, and Eve makes full use of the metaphorical potential in the business of grafting and caring for their precious trees. At moments, especially as she gets closer to telling of her current life in sections directed to her own husband, Nomi's heated language and lush imagery are perilously close to cloying and overripe; the book could have used trimming by a strict and unsentimental hand. But she's hardly a Pollyanna -- she records failure and disappointment, too, and painful mistakes that can't be righted. The story of Nomi's father's brother Gavriel, for example, born with profound mental and physical defects and sent by his agonized parents to live in an institution, haunts all who follow in its wake. By deciding to speak his name no longer -- to erase him from the family history -- they have subjected themselves as well as their other children to a sentence far worse than they could have imagined.

-- Maria Russo

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"