Death of an Ordinary Man By Glen Duncan. Grove/Atlantic, 320 pp., $13.00 paperback.

The Solace of Leaving Early. By Haven Kimmel. Anchor, 288 pp., $13.95 paperback.

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories. By Joan Silber. Norton, 244 pp., $23.95.

Confinement. By Carrie Brown, Algonquin, 368 pp., $24.95.

TO ME, THE BEST place to read any great book is at the ocean side, a sun-drenched, dune-crested symbol of eternity. Though it may be cold where you are, picture me under an umbrella at the shore. Beside me on the towel lies a sandy collection of recent novels and volumes of stories: books full of unrequited lovers, wandering ghosts, small-town intellectuals, missionaries, poets. Not one is religious in the Christian-bookstore sense, which is to say the books are full of sex, and nobody gets saved (or raptured). Still, these are all theological stories: they have a refreshing preoccupation with the deepest religious questions, framed not in the literal, rational world but in the world of poetry and the particular, most often the context of frail human life.

Which is no surprise. The call of eternity is ever upon us, but its signal seems weak compared to the hungers, comforts and agonies of the body--all overwhelming, some transporting. Not even art can bypass the physical world. What art can do is use the visible to speak of the invisible, the known to speak of the unknown. This is truth in its sacramental form, where a metaphor is like a little Eucharist: it's a bit of eternity within something earthly, even ordinary.

Few things are as ordinary, or as ripe for metaphor, as death. Glen Duncan's Death of an Ordinary Man begins morbidly, at the graveside of Nathan Clark, a middle-aged history teacher. Nathan's mourners include his guilty ex-wife, his best friend, his tormented son and daughter and his self-loathing father. Nathan himself hovers near, discovering that all has changed. His body has been amputated from his soul, and yet consciousness continues. Is there anyone else out here in this limbo--God, for instance? Nobody answers, but something drives Nathan to understand the mystery of his own death.