Poet James Lasdun confirms his career as an important novelist with “Seven Lies” (Norton, 204 pages, $23.95). The follow-up to his debut, “The Horned Man,” reads like a visit to the cold humidity of Thomas Mann and Robert Musil: literature as the determined articulation of failure.

In Mr. Lasdun’s ingenious frame story, Stefan Vogel, an exile from communist East Germany, composes his memoir as an act of confession that will destroy his life. Self-destruction is the beginning of philosophy, Stefan notes: “I am attempting to understand myself here, not to make excuses, but not to fall into in the inverse vanity of exaggerating my own misdeeds either.”

Stefan’s fraud is simple, then complicated by political context. As an aristocratic child living in East Germany, he was forced by his mother to adopt artistic pretensions. He recast contraband verse – Whitman, at first – into short, rhymed lines, in German, although Mr. Lasdun gives it in English:

I celebrate myself, myself I sing And my beliefs are yours, as everything I have is yours, each atom. So we laze – My soul and I – passing the summer days Observing spears of grass …

He claims the poetry as his own, reciting it at one of his mother’s soirees. The recitation succeeds, but Stefan loses his innocence: “Quite simply, the straightforward relation of cordial respect, or at least neutral interest, that is supposed to exist between people who have no prior reason not to respect each other was no longer available to me,” he writes.

Stefan’s moral fog blends indistinctly into his general adolescent misery, and Mr. Lasdun’s sober poetry neatly captures the torpidity of Stefan’s teenage years. “I retain from that period the sense of a mysterious relationship between rooms and time,” Stefan writes of his “connoisseurship of vacancy.”

This paradoxically reliable narrator adopts the supreme tone of a man in winter. As a young man, Stefan falls in love with a dissident actress with “utterly straight white-blond hair,” in the Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. In order to enter her circle, he both resumes his fraudulent poetics – “a basis from which to promote myself,” he frankly acknowledges – and becomes a Stasi puppet.

Remembering these processes from his new home in the Catskills, Stefan finds himself thinking of “the actual naked plundering motion in which a human being becomes a demon.” His macabre but sensationally authentic tone is worth the price of the book; that its tale is lean and compelling seems only natural.

Stefan’s vicissitudes, as a popular boy, an unpopular teenager, a striking young man, and then a deeply conflicted exile take place on two levels: the social and the introverted. He describes “the faint background suspicion that everything one could do in that land was inherently tainted with futility and fraudulence,” but the beauty of this novel is that Stefan assumes personal responsibility for all his actions.

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The productivity of Joyce Carol Oates has become the most interesting thing about her work. To read a new novel by Ms. Oates is to look for clues to its efficient production. Her latest, “Missing Mom” (Ecco, 434 pages, $25.95), begins with an exercise in addition: the arrival of guests at an eclectic Mother’s Day party. One guest is described as resembling Cher, “in tumbledown silver-streaked hair, layers of witchy swishing black taffeta and red fishnet stockings and high heels.” An abundance of welcome adjectives, an authoritative completeness, from head to toe – does that make a novel a year?

Ms. Oates readies her perennial themes with crack efficiency. After a Lear-like Mother’s Day, the narrator daughter’s emotional complex is fully assembled.

“She doesn’t know me. Doesn’t want to know me,” Nikki decides, bristling at the way her mother addresses a friend as “love.” Her mother’s fully anticipated death is not natural but, of course, graphically violent. Multiply stabbed by a charity case, Nikki’s mother lies on the garage floor of her suburban home – an earthly visitation from Ms. Oates’s violent star. Nikki later learns that her maternal grandmother was herself found dead, of self-inflected wounds, and the specter of suicide and hidden suffering propels her own neuroses, without appearing to directly cause them.

Ms. Oates deploys her novel as a mirror, automatically and dutifully reflecting the society around it. “Getting a headstart on cleanup was for Mom what illicit sex was for other people,” she writes, waggishly. In another passage, Nikki relates, “I could have told the detective that my mother’s car was a metallic-green Honda, a fairly new model, four-door, but Rob Chisholm knew precisely that it was a 2001 Honda Accord,” demonstrating not only a gender divide but another of Ms. Oates’s central themes: forgetfulness and the dissolution of personality.

The inhabitants of the social novel are for Ms. Oates like crash-test dummies, advancing the notion that her output is cheap or mass-produced. “After seeing Mom in the canoe coffin, I was having difficulty recalling her as she’d been in life,” Nikki says of her mother. In novel after novel, Ms. Oates orchestrates the disappearance of her characters.

blytal@nysun.com