Francine Prose’s new novel, “A Changed Man” (HarperCollins, 421 pages, $24.95), is nominally about a neo-Nazi who tries to have a change of heart. Vincent Nolan became a white supremacist for circumstantial reasons – unemployment, restlessness – and he leaves the fold for the same reasons. Ms. Prose essentially suggests that the title of her book is an empty phrase.

It is Meyer Maslow, famous Holocaust survivor and founder of the World Brotherhood Watch, who most interests Ms. Prose’s subtle satirical mind. In “Guided Tours of Hell,” Ms. Prose skewered the petty vanities that even relatively serious visitors bring to death camps. Similar ground is covered here: Meyer is conscious of using his painful memories as a way to comfort himself and remind himself of the distance he has traveled. “How shameless to use the Holocaust as an analgesic,” he thinks to himself.”

Meyer’s politics of memory are complicated by his duties at the World Brotherhood Watch. What he loves most is the real work: negotiating the release of political prisoners, for example. But fund-raising occupies more and more of his time, and ex-Nazi Nolan is a godsend, in terms of publicity. He walks in to Meyer’s office cold, and the next morning publicity releases are being prepared. Bonnie Kalen, Meyer’s head of development, wonders “Who’s scamming whom, exactly?”

Ms. Prose heavily underlines the symmetry between Meyer and Nolan. Both believe in personal charisma and crave sainthood and fame. Meyer asks to see Nolan’s tattoos (SS lightning bolts), then shows his own. Meyer insists on the difference – “My tattoos and yours are not the same!” He is obviously excited but also threatened by sheer visual symmetry, which brooks no nuance. The incident comes back to haunt him when the foundation’s publicist leaks the anecdote to a television host, who then asks, in the neutrally polite terms of a ringmaster: “Do you think you could show our audience?” Meyer refuses. Elsewhere, he and his staff find themselves exaggerating the seriousness of Nolan’s original commitment to racism, to make his conversion seem more dramatic.

Caught between the tendentious identities of Meyer and Nolan, Bonnie Kalen is the novel’s most sympathetic character. A nervous divorcee, she’s been saved by her new job: “She believes that Brotherhood Watch is a great organization. Everything follows from that. It makes everything into a test. Is she great enough to work there?” For everyone in this novel, self-presentation is instrumental to moral life.

Ms. Prose asks a question that deserves long consideration in our city of foundations and charities: Can too much good publicity hollow out good intentions? This excellent social novel tends to answer: Yes.

***

The hero of Pablo Medina’s “The Cigar Roller” (Grove Press, 178 pages, $21) is unusually suited to stream-of-consciousness narration. Amadeo Terra, a Cuban-American, was an expert cigar roller who was otherwise impulsive and aloof. Now he is paralyzed from top to bottom, with only his eyelids to move.

Amadeo veers from intense fascination with his surroundings – the nurses, the view out the window, his own gross functions – to somber recollection and reeling regret. Amadeo’s mind runs back to Julia, his wife of many years whom he finally left. But “it is Julia he wants next to him now.” Now he “understands many things that passed him by when he had all his faculties.”

He is wryly satisfied that he spent his life as a devotee of his repetitious art: It was “a vocation of smoke in tune with his life, with anybody’s life.” Amadeo prizes “la vitola, the spirit of incipient perfection, which drove you to roll not one cigar but a dozen, a hundred, all the same shape, the same size. Defy God and do it every day for a lifetime.” It seems to be this addiction to perfection that kept Amadeo from happiness. “Tobacco is the purest product in the world,” he thinks, and it is purity – a clear mind, unencumbered by responsibility, that he gets.

Mr. Medina conducts Amadeo through his regrets with grace. He is a masculine romance, a silent type for whom original sin is the raison d’etre, and these late regrets are part of the show. Mr. Medina’s assured sentences suggest a decisive mind that wanders with confidence:

No one is listening. No one is here to correct him. If he is an elephant on Monday, so be it. If he is an insect on Tuesday, who is there to tell him he is not? He can drool … he can be a killer of men, a seducer of women, he can be an old man lying helpless in bed entertaining himself with stories.

Rarely are the tools of the Modernist novel used so quietly. Amadeo is eloquent when he is stupid, longing “for all that has rolled off him to the ground beyond his reach: cake, Julia, island, past.” He worries about exile – from Cuba, but also from the intimate interiority that he is slowly discovering as he lays paralyzed. Mr. Medina’s psychological novel is a mental idyll: Amadeo’s enforced tranquility is no less fecund than Wordsworth’s.

***

In Marina Lewycka’s debut novel, “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” (The Penguin Press, 296 pages, $24.95), Nadia, a daughter of Ukrainian refugees in Britain, finds that her father “has turned into an eighty-five-year-old teenager, tuned in to his private music.” Not content with a return to babyhood, he has paused midway in order to develop a ribald crush on a buxom 34-year-old.

The gold digger is Valentina, herself a Ukrainian of the new order. She puts peroxide in her hair, likes cheap luxury, and offends the natively British tastes of Nadia and her older sister, Vera. Nadia says, “I have a husband who cooks polenta.” Valentina – after the wedding, after moving in with Nadia’s father – cooks a microwave dinner for five and says: “I make modern cooking, not peasant cooking.” But her father happily conflates his nostalgia for prewar Ukraine with this vamp. Nadia and Vera have been feuding over their mother’s will, but now they conspire to thwart Valentina.

Ms. Lewycka’s sense of humor will be familiar to any adults who suddenly find themselves coping with crazy parents. Ms. Lewycka occasionally stymies the pace of this comedy with their father’s lectures on farm equipment – an unnecessary gimmick, although it contributes to Ms. Lewycka’s larger system of historical ballast: Vera has long withheld her childhood stories of labor camps from her younger sister. Now, in the turmoil created by Valentina, these stories are told.

Nadia begins the novel regretting “this kick of emotion that drags me back to the bogey-nose days, to the time when my daddy was still my hero and I was still vulnerable to his disapproval.” By the end of the novel, she has mastered her past.

But Ms. Lewycka’s talents are too much for these classroom-sized themes. Her real achievement is her portrayal of Valentina. Through deportation hearings and divorce courts, Valentina is clearly deceitful, but her father seems much healthier when she is around. In a moment of feminine complicity, Nadia sympathizes with Valentina’s “warm, sensuous bulk.” Certainly any literary character who can expel such a stream of adjectives as Valentina does – “Nikolai, you crazy dog-eaten-brain graveyard-deadman” – cannot go entirely without the reader’s own sympathies.