FICTION

AT THE SIGN OF THE NAKED WAITER by Amy Herrick (HarperCollins: $20; 256 pp.) . This first novel is like an attractive stranger who weaves her way through the crowd at a cocktail party and kisses you. You strongly suspect that she’s drunk and has mistaken you for somebody else, but still, a kiss is a kiss.

There’s no way that Amy Herrick should be able to get away with the smacker she plants on our lips here. This is a story about growing old, mental illness, AIDS, the vagaries of the criminal-justice system and the fears of parenthood. It’s also about love, sponges from outer space, ghosts in blue-and-white-checked bathrobes and a handsome young neighbor whose naked back, glimpsed through a window, bears “the beginnings of wings . . . little feathered nubs.”

The plot is simple: We look in on 13-year-old Sarah until she’s 30 or so, at intervals of three or four years, and see how much of her youthful vision has survived life’s arbitrariness and unfairness, including the discovery that “there wasn’t a man worth spit anywhere in the universe.” And Sarah is one of the lucky ones. Her best friend, Robin, who once seemed destined for adventure, is crippled by schizophrenia. Her brilliant brother, Fred, has a date with the killer virus.

Still, “Naked Waiter” does work--because of its characters, and also because of its style. There’s something almost Cheever-like in the way Herrick skates over the unbearable on the wit and shimmer of her prose. Pregnancy is feeling “like a tugboat with half an engine, huge and lost, steaming with pitiful, dreamlike slowness down an utterly unfamiliar jungle river.” This isn’t a novel for everyone, but some readers are going to like it a lot.