One of the best reasons to revisit a forgotten writer is for her language. Language can be picked up and appreciated immediately, like an artifact. Isobel English, republished now by Black Sparrow Press, deserves such attention.

I shall never forget the sight of the big dark patches on the dry garden path; the village helpers had been drying the lettuce leaves, swinging them to and fro in rhythmic movements in the round wire cages.

For sheer visual freshness, look at those lettuce leaves, in their unimaginable cages, and see how they go back and explain those “big dark patches.” Almost every sentence in “Every Eye” (Black Sparrow Press, 192 pages, $23.95) presents a visual surprise.

But English’s style has its peculiarities. She takes romantic liberties, venturing, for example, to describe the blood of strangers. She leaps, but everywhere she perches with confidence.

Sometimes she seems to go too far. Having received an interesting letter while on vacation, English’s heroine slides it under a pile of newspapers, not wanting to share it with her husband. Look at the strange sentence that follows: “It is a long detour, but how strong and detached one can be in one’s deceit, what resistance, and what capitulation finally.”

The word “detour” is left hanging, awaiting the appositive “deceit” that is hidden behind the negative “but”: Deceit is a long detour. And then the two flourishes – resistance and capitulation – expressing something that perhaps deserves the liturgical flair of the “what” construction.

But “Every Eye,” published in England in 1956 and reissued now on its 50th anniversary, has charms beyond language. English’s style becomes the expression of a life examined, attentively, if only in retrospect. Hatty Latterly, on a belated honeymoon trip to Ibiza, ponders the death of her aunt Cynthia. When Hatty was a teenager, she looked up to chic, worldly Cynthia. But as Hatty matures, and begins to see Jasper Lomax, a man twice her age, earning Cynthia’s catty interference, their relationship changes. Meanwhile Cynthia’s husband, her Uncle Otway, has driven Hatty from her vocation, the piano. Hatty comes to rue the disguises that come with different ages: “there are the young who strive to be old and knowing, the middle-aged with their more deadly weapon of self-knowledge and selfsufficiency.” Cynthia wields the latter expertly.

Now, in quiet Ibiza, Hatty begins to understand how she ever left her youthful resentment behind. The process started in Brittany, where she had gone to school. After a perfect quiet afternoon with an old piano, Hatty lies in bed, studying a perfect rosette in the molding. “This was my private harvest, and the knowledge of it was tempered with humility for the first time in all my thirty-five years.” Contentment leads to humility.

But the process is only completed at the very end of this very short novel, when a surprise discovery sets the final arrangement of the cards, which have been shuffled and reshuffled in the short space of 150 pages. Hatty’s life-encompassing relief, as expressed in this sentence, might serve as an ars poetica for English, for her nimble life-summarizing style and her striking visual points: “It was as if all my life had suddenly been explained away and there would be no more to contend with but the minute pinpricks of existence.”

***

T.C. Boyle’s new novel, “Talk Talk” (Viking, 340 pages, $25.95), is not one of his best. After two stand-out historical novels, “Drop City” and “The Inner Circle,” and a sometimes excellent story collection, “Tooth and Claw,” this new novel, set in contemporary times, feels like an inevitable punt.

The book’s chief fault lies in its trumped-up plot. Mr. Boyle loves an odd scenario, but his recent historic novels, about acid hippies and Alfred Kinsey, have been backed up by the weirdness of historical fact. “Talk Talk,” by contrast, has only the trendiness of its themes to back it up.

Dana Halter, a deaf woman, runs a stop sign.The cop who pulls her over arrests her. There are several outstanding warrants. Dana’s one call goes to Bridger, her boyfriend, a special effects hack who ends up losing his voice, ironically, before the novel closes. Meanwhile, it’s a clear-cut case of identity theft, and the charges against Dana are dismissed.

That would be that, but for Dana’s inner reserve of fury: “She lived in a world apart,her own world,a better world,and silence was her refuge and her hard immutable shell and she spoke to herself from deep in the unyielding core of it.”

Mr. Boyle’s complicated take on being deaf deserves praise, if you can get past the amplified sound of his language. As Dana’s search for the man who stole her identity continues, Mr. Boyle keeps the book alive with bitter suspense and not unpredictable character arcs. His writing, as usual, feels a little too easy, though here, as always, it’s hard not to admire his fluent storytelling.