“Possibly the question most often asked these days about modern fiction is why do we keep on getting novels about freaks and poor people” – so wrote Flannery O’Connor, in 1963. In 2006, American fiction continues to seize upon our weird domestic squalor, most interestingly in the writing of George Saunders. But even the recent work of Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx exploits the West and Midwest primarily for its screwballs. Like Buffalo Bill, they take their neighbors on an international tour, in the form of a circus. Last summer, the University of Nebraska Press continued this tradition with the launch of its Flyover Fiction series, alluding in its title not only to the obscurity of the Midwest, but to the political charge that obscurity has recently – and perennially – acquired.

Like O’Connor, the Flyover Fiction series editor, Ron Hansen, writes fiction from a Catholic perspective, and “Tin God” (University of Nebraska Press, 179 pages, $24.95), his most significant selection so far, bespeaks his interest in religion and American regionalism. The author and poet Terese Svoboda imagines a God who lives in the fields of Nebraska, sowing seed and blowing the wind while maintaining a weak sense of humor. “Grass is what you have when you don’t plant, but I plant that too,” the God says.

Ms. Svoboda does not limit herself to paradox. Like the later Patti Smith, her God is obsessed with grain, meat, digestion, economy, and excrement. Her tale takes place in a single field, first explored by a Spanish conquistador whose tin helmet, shiny in the tall grass, is taken as a sign of divinity by local Native Americans. This tin god couples with a young woman; Ms. Svoboda describes their romance with her usual emphasis on tediousness: “This they leave, they reenter the river, the man with his tights and his armor trailing, the girl watching for the rocks he steps on.” Like most of Ms. Svoboda’s sentences, this is hard to visualize, but effectively communicates the close-up shabbiness that she would have characterize the Great Plains.

The conquistador’s generations reach to the present day, in the person of Pork, a drug-dealing no-account who drives a black Porsche, giving Ms. Svoboda’s God reason to indulge deeply in immature cynicism and leading puns: “The finding of god in this search includes death and torture too, if the gold is on the wrong side, the side without whoever’s god.”

Throughout this writing runs a dual impulse: to prove more casual and successfully demotic than cosmopolitan fiction, on the one hand, and to harrow the pieties of small town life,on the other.The notion of “flyover fiction,”fiction that perceives itself as being ignored, is both opportunistic and fatalistic. When Ms. Svoboda has one of her characters re-create Cadillac Ranch – the iconic installation outside Amarillo – burying his cars not at the angle of the pyramid of Giza, as in the real installation, but according to the plan of Stonehenge, she provides a metaphor for her project: derivative, and in thrall to the touristic appeal of wacky Americana.

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There is something equally touristic in Erri De Luca’s Italian gem, “Three Horses” (Other Press, 136 pages, $11.95), but his book is more successful, if only because it advertises a better kind of tourism. He writes things like “Back then communists used to be poor kids who knew how to look good,” and often mentions manly spices like sage and garlic.Mr.De Luca’s hero, a 50-year-old gardener, a refugee from the violence of pre-Falklands Argentina, lives a Hemingwayesque life of sensuality.

Hemingway used procedural descriptions to telegraph the purity and attentiveness of his heroes – the perfect narrators. However self-indulgent they were, they always knew what they were doing, whether fishing or eating spaghetti.

Mr. De Luca’s narrator has a similar mix of attentiveness and self-indulgence. He applies a kind of private geometric reading to everything he sees:

I turn docile pages, slow morsels, then I tear my head away from the white of the paper and the tablecloth and follow the line formed by the upper edge of the wall tiles in its tour around the room, passing behind the two black pupils of a woman, which sit on the vector like two notes split apart by the lower line of the pentagram. They’re staring straight at me.

Mr. De Luca feasts on such observations, citing the routines of blue-collar work as his inspiration: “what matters is living with your head between your feet, your face down to tend the goings-on below.” His peculiar work aesthetic was evident in “The Trench,” which appeared in last week’s New Yorker, but that story pales beside the more colorful story of “Three Horses.” Even when Mr. De Luca’s prose is almost precious, it also recalls epic speech, or the Song of Solomon. “You caress every bone in my body, place your lips on my marrow, set my body at peace,” as the narrator’s lover explains. “Three Horses” will deeply satisfy the romantic, Spartan reader, though it may also embarrass him.

blytal@nysun.com