The heroine of Amy Bloom’s new novel of historical fiction personifies some very contemporary desires: to be sexually frank, romantically unique, and maternally instinctual. As we learn in the flashback swirls that begin “Away” (Random House, 240 pages, $23.95), Lillian Leyb is at once a refugee of Stalin’s pogroms and a plucky immigrant on the Lower East Side — occupying a cultural moment that has not gone neglected, lately.

Because she has suffered, Ms. Bloom suggests, Lillian knows the world. She has license to get what she wants. Bold and flirtatious at a job fair, she ignores the women she has superseded and smiles at her new bosses:

Lillian has endured the murder of her family, the loss of her daughter, Sophie, an ocean crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in her cousin Frieda’s two rooms, smelling of men and urine and fried food and uncertainty and need. Just so, she thinks, and she smiles at these three people, the new king and queen and prince of her life, as if she has just risen from a soft, high feather bed to enjoy an especially pretty morning.

In a later episode, hiding in a broom closet, Lillian overhears an adulterous woman whose laugh sounds like “bells on a warhorse, and [Lillian] wonders what terrible things happened to this woman to make her so brave.” If Lillian does not feel sorry for herself, she does perhaps feel proud.

Lillian proves to be a fiery mother when she learns that her daughter, Sophie, is not dead but has been exiled to Siberia. She immediately plots a cross-continental voyage, all the way to the Bering Strait, under the advice of the eccentric tailor whom Lillian, a tender woman after all, wistfully loves. Lillian begins her voyage by servicing a train conductor; she follows a vein of sexual candor that stretches from Albany to Alaska. When she finally makes it to the snowy wastes of Alaska, Lillian sees “her place in the scale of this country, how easily the Lower East Side could drop into the crevasses ahead of her.”

The epic literally sweeps the Lower East Side into a crevasse. Despite her modest talk about scale, Lillian knows more about the world than do most people she meets. In British Columbia, a sad widower takes Lillian in and goes to sleep hoping to dream of his lost wife, Helen. We are then immediately told that “Lillian lies in Helen Gilpin’s uncle’s bed, thinking about Joseph Stalin.”

But another character linked with Lillian shares her superior consciousness. When Lillian takes up with a black prostitute named Gumdrop in Seattle, we learn in a parenthetical what is really on a prostitute’s mind:

(Three short gasps, ten seconds apart, Gumdrop crying out softly, Oh God, my God, as if she were shamed and thrilled to feel such piercing sweetness, while mentally she reviewed Half-Century magazine’s recent article on Baptist missionaries in China.)

Lillian’s sexual opportunism, initially cast as the outcome of world-historical trauma, comes to read as mere worldliness. Are we meant to admire it? Looking at the 1920s from 2007, we naturally root for the oppressed prostitute or the defenseless immigrant who can see through old-fashioned mores. Lillian seems to be our heroine because she knows what we know. This is why, despite its winning details, “Away” seems less like a historical novel than a contemporary fiction.

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“Hartsburg, USA” (Bloomsbury, 358pages,$24.95),DavidMizner’s new novel, serves our prejudices more frankly, envisioning an Ohio school board election held in the divisive year of 2003. On the right, Bevy Baer represents the bornagain Christians who increasingly set the agenda in Hartsburg. On the left, Wallace Cormier, a failed screenwriter, hopes to win the vote of anyone disgruntled by said Christians.

On the defensive throughout the book, Cormier will probably be the hero of this novel’s readers. Mr. Mizner therefore works hard to compromise him; meanwhile working hard to make Baer seem likeable. Her cooking may be bad, all frozen meat and Prego, and her husband may be a spoiled Promise Keeper, but she has drive and a suitably complex interiority. She was once a naughty girl, before she saw the light. All this obviously credits Mr. Mizner’s savvy. Cormier, fulfilling another stereotype, loves lattes, sleeps late, and lets his teenage daughter drink alcohol.

A novel like this could work several ways. It could be a snake-and-mongoose debate, a riot of argument and ideas. In such a case, the sympathies of both the reader and the author could work together, sticking to one side, making the political arguments matter, novelistically. But this is a novel about real-world politics. Mr. Mizner keeps our sympathies shifting: We supportwhomeverhasnotmessed up most recently. In the end, Cormier hopes to nail Bevy Baer with a sex video, but it is her past, after all, that won our sympathy in the first place. It is a testament to this novel’s honesty that it is as unsatisfying as much of contemporary politics.

blytal@nysun.com