Does summer make you dumber? Can the beach burn your brain? The way mass-market publishers play it — snake-peddling creatively bankrupt, trashy novels as " beach reads " and " guilty pleasures " (emphasis on guilty) all season long — you’d think there was scientific proof that IQ points bear some inverse relation to degrees Fahrenheit.

As autumn approaches, then, we literary types (read: library-card-carrying liberals) breathe sighs of relief to see the media turning their attention, however fleetingly, to more-deserving, better-crafted works of relative complexity. Certainly there’s no confusing them with feel-good fluff: the coming season’s most genuinely pleasurable, and often funniest, narratives are also the most wrenching. They’re all concerned with weighing memory of the past on a scale of cruelty ranging from existential to visceral, memory that plunges characters into stupor as well as feeling.

Of course, pleasure and pain overlap in ways that mirror comedy and tragedy; postmodernism loves to hate the dichotomies it renders false (or farce). Take Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (Henry Holt & Co., $24). Its protagonist, Professor David Zimmer, has hit the bottle and the bottom since losing his wife and sons in a plane crash. He begins to emerge from his torpor only after viewing an old silent comedy on TV starring a Chaplin-esque figure named Horace Mann, which inspires David to write the movie actor's filmography — and piques his interest in the unsolved mystery of Mann’s disappearance years ago. The grieving writer and the silent comedian are clearly doubles in the story that follows, which is a mystery not only in a literal sense but also in that it portrays the startling likeness of opposites — of death and life, comedy and tragedy, open-endedness and closure.

While comedy dominates in Frederick Reuss’s The Wasties (Pantheon Books, $23), it too is at once tempered and fueled by melancholy (call it melan-comic). And it too deals with a professor facing the imminent loss of his wife — this time as a result of his own virtual death. Michael Taylor has contracted the wasties, a " disease of the soul " that leads to infantilism accompanied by fading memory of adult life; its symptoms include hallucinations of rendezvous with deceased writers (e.g., Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he wrestles) and muteness. Part of the joke, of course, is that as our narrator, Taylor is a motor mouth, and a coherent one at that; the appeal of the book lies in this formal exuberance, especially in contrast with the languorous plot. For instance, Taylor has a penchant for elaborate similes and metaphors that are sometimes wonderfully silly, sometimes poignant: he describes the residence for " assisted living " in which he eventually lands as " a museum where the artwork roams around viewing the viewer " and where life passes him by.

The Incantation of Frida K. (Seven Stories Press, $23.95), by Kate Braverman, also concentrates on the disintegration of the protagonist, who experiences an implausible slew of accidents, afflictions, and addictions throughout the novel. And yet such was Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s real life, which Braverman otherwise fictionalizes in a novel that has been called both " shockingly bad " and " remarkably beautiful " ; no doubt both Braverman and Kahlo, with their penchants for the lyrical and lurid, the sexy and vulnerable, are acquired tastes — tastes most jaded critics lack.

Still, while biographies of Kahlo tell much the same fascinating story — of her leftist sympathies, her bohemian stints in Paris and New York, her numerous affairs while engaged in a love-hate relationship with Diego Rivera — they can’t capture the half-savored crises and passionate, passing moods of Kahlo’s aesthetic the way Braverman’s prose can; you’ve got to applaud the campy pathos of a sentence like " It was a day when death wakes up, takes a shot of tequila, goes out stalking. "

A similarly lush and touching grotesquery pervades Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27), the second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides (FS&G, 1993). Our funny, smart protagonist, Calliope Stephanides, a/k/a Cal, is a hermaphrodite whose story traces the causes as well as the effects of his/her condition. In a story that is part family saga, part social study, and part coming-of-age tale, Cal follows his/her grandparents (who are siblings) from Greece to the suburbs of Detroit, where his parents (who are cousins) defy the god of genetics one too many times. Interspersed with this history is Cal’s own moving story, set in the era of Vietnam and station wagons. The question becomes, is his/her background and the angst to which it leads really so different from our own? Isn’t Cal just one of us, only more so?

But if Cal’s an unsettling Every(wo)man, the protagonist of Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian’s new novel, One Man’s Bible (HarperCollins, $26), is uncannily familiar as well. The two-track tale begins with a Paris exile who, after many years away from his homeland of China, travels to Hong Kong, where he enters into a somewhat sadomasochistic relationship with a woman who wants to know what his life was like under Mao’s regime. As the resulting account of a grim existence marked by persecution and betrayal unfolds, the identity of its unnamed narrator becomes increasingly unstable. The perspective of his tale alternates between the second- and third-person, such that a disturbing sense of empathy, or complicity, nags at the reader throughout the virtual autobiography — the only kind of autobiography there is, after all.

Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthiet@bu.edu