Corniness and squalor have an important place in the contemporary literature of the American West and South. Charles Portis and Sherman Alexie have done their part. Annie Proulx, formerly known as “E.,” has her Wyoming Stories. This is from “Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2” (Scribner, 219 pages, $25): “The older child, Vernon Clarence, edged along the sofa toward the wall heater. His small hands grasped a beer can and shook it. … He drank the dregs, warm beer running down his chin and soaking his pajama top. … The freshly emptied can rolled under the sofa.”

Outsiders think this is tedious, like Blaxploitation without the frisson of political incorrectness. And no one is happy to see the regal cleanliness of the Western horizon cluttered up with trailers. But to people who have to deal with the likes of Vernon Clarence, if only at the Wal-Mart checkout, this kind of fiction is like sunshine. Vernon Clarence desperately needs to be skewered.

Whether Annie Proulx is the person to do it is another question. Her Wyoming Stories are set around Elk Tooth, a comic apotheosis of the nowhere town with no stores but three bars. “In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society’s pull.” This is a complicated comic rubric, because the people are already, in part of a long American tradition, exaggerating themselves. If you get on stilts with the clowns, you have to be careful.

Ms. Proulx’s language is no help. She litters her text with references – “the sun shone behind his ears, that turned the color of chokecherry jelly” – that allude only to impenetrable nativeness. At the next turn words like “schadenfreude” are carelessly dropped into the indirect discourse of a sun-bleached rancher.

It is when Ms. Proulx’s stories directly take on cultural problems that “Bad Dirt” truly disappoints. A Native American woman has, implausibly, not even an inkling of the atrocities of Wounded Knee, until she does some research that changes her life. An old rancher, disgusted with the cheapness of the modernizing West, is made to witness a heavy-handed civic parade which celebrates, in costume, its stock stereotypes: “it was all pioneers, outlaws, Indians, and gas.” A New Yorker, fed up with her experiment in Wyoming living, flies back home and looks down to observe “great brown and red curves, scooped cirques, rived canyons with unsteady water in the depths.”

What is she talking about?

The great thing, in lampooning the people of Elk Tooth, would be to write like someone Elk Toothers could like.

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The literature of seduction has a special license to poetry. Because we agree on the logic of sex but maintain that attraction is basically mysterious, the writer can write romantically without sacrificing the reader’s trust. “For the first time, she looked him in the eye. And he felt himself a prey in the claws of this teenager, who was reviving him, bringing him back to life.” Coming from a Wehrmacht officer in occupied Paris, this is heady stuff.

Nella Bielski’s “The Year is ’42” (Pantheon, 207 pages, $18.95) is essentially a military romance. Karl Bazinger, the Wehrmacht officer and seducer in occupied Paris, disdains the Nazis but is loyal to them. “So you don’t get on so well with the chancellor and his aides, what of it?” For better or worse, Ms. Bielski, a Ukrainian writing in French, brings Bazinger sympathetically to life.

Bazinger’s complex of moral opinions, which get him in trouble and require a transfer to the Eastern front, lead to the story of Katia, a doctor in Kiev. Katia and her friends are victims of first the Communists, then the occupying Nazis. She is, partly by circumstance, a paragon of underdog virtues. It is a testament to Ms. Bielski’s good intentions as a writer that Bazinger’s eventual meeting and tryst with Katia is not a political allegory, but a simply put illustration of what might happen in a year like 1942.

Ms. Bielski’s novel is quite good, a quick read that seems in sync with holiday Gemutlichkeit and holiday sadness. It is not quite defeatist, but it does favor humane relaxation over strenuous resistance to the times. The self-negation of Bazinger’s seductions are a template for his larger, fatal lassitude about Hitler. One character quotes Mandelstam, “It seems to me that our time, like any other time, is illegal.”

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Louis Auchincloss’s 60th novel, “East Side Story,” (Houghton Mifflin, 227 pages, $24) obviously profits from the author’s long experience writing about Manhattan’s upper classes. Mr. Auchincloss begins his tale of the Carnachan family emigration from Scotland in the 1820s. From that distant historical starting point, his novel trots through the family tree, ending little more than 200 pages later.

Ronny, David Carnachan’s great great grandson, refuses to leave the State Department, although he is disillusioned with the Vietnam war. “We must not lose the war, Dad. I must not leave my team.” His father, an old lawyer, is not impressed: “Ron! You talk as if you were back at Chelton! This isn’t a football game.”

Mr. Auchincloss’s storytelling depends on crises like this, when the decisions of the very privileged seesaw between the momentous and the personal, trivial. His greatest effect is the poignancy with which the upper classes, upon the brink of disaster, are helplessly saved by their money and their connections. In this sweeping historical novel personal pride and folly are blunted and superceded by the quick succession of generations.

In this way Mr. Auchincloss differs from Edith Wharton, with whom he is often compared. Wharton shows how one person, like Lily Bart, can be utterly destroyed by the societal contravention of her dreams. In “East Side Story,” dreams begin and end more soporifically – as is perhaps more typical of the human condition.

Even at the top, Mr. Auchincloss emphasizes, the exigencies of living overwhelm the ideals of the imagination. David Carnachan, the head of the Carnachan family in the modern era, believes as a child that he, his brother, and his cousin can form a troika of power in the United States. As an adult, his very ambition, with its concomitant savviness, prevents him from doing anything important. He “took sides in his actions but rarely in his own mind”; he “never honored his prejudices with any unnecessary loyalty.”

The latter day Carnachans like to contemplate the legacy of their strict Presbyterian forebears, particularly as regards moral comeuppance. They hold on to that sense of fate – not, Mr. Auchincloss suggests, out of superstition, but out of wishing for a more striking family tree.