Early in “Life Class,” the first of Pat Barker’s three novels about a group of painters who meet while studying at the Slade School of Art, a young student named Paul Tarrant takes a girl to a music hall. Paul (based loosely on the British painter Paul Nash) prefers acrobats and jugglers to “one-act plays,” which “always struck him as being rather pointless—you’d no sooner worked out who the characters were than the curtain came down.” It’s a sentiment that Barker appears to share; she is best known for her “Regeneration” trilogy, set during the First World War, which follows the lives of several historical figures, among them the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the doctor William Rivers, who worked with soldiers suffering from shell shock. “Life Class” and its sequel, “Toby’s Room,” initially seemed to be advancing in a parallel track, as Paul and his classmates—including Kit Neville, whose inspiration is the Futurist C. R. W. Nevinson, and Elinor Brooke, a distant analogue to the Bloomsbury-affiliated painter Dora Carrington—moved from their studies at Slade just before the First World War to the hospitals and fields at the front.

With “Noonday” (Doubleday), the most recent book, Barker breaks the pattern of her previous trilogy, shifting the action from the First World War to the Second. In “Toby’s Room,” Neville was already established as “the great war artist.” Paul, too, had made a name for himself with his war paintings, and Elinor’s work, focussing on themes less overtly war-related, was beginning to sell. When we return to these characters two decades later, in “Noonday,” Neville has become known mainly as a critic, Paul is considered the better artist, and Elinor—now married to Paul—has gained a serious reputation, and has paintings hanging in the Tate. As war artists, they all suffer from a “strange predicament, to be remembered for what everybody else was trying to forget.”

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It’s unclear what to call Annie Dillard, where to shelve her. Over more than 40 years, she has been, sometimes all at once, a poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, naturalist, critic, theologian, collagist and full-throated singer of mystic incantations. Instead of being any particular kind of writer, she is, flagrantly, a consciousness – an abstract, all-encompassing energy field that inhabits a given piece of writing the way sunlight slings to a rock: delicately but with absolute force, always leaving a shadow behind. This is an essential part of what it means to be human, this shifting between the transcendent self and the contingent world, the ecstasy and the dental bill. We all do some version of it, all the time. But Dillard does it more insistently. This month, she publishes “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New,” a collection of pieces that spans her entire variegated career.

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