FICTION

SONGDOGS by Colum McCann (Metropolitan Books: $22.50; 212 pp.). Songdogs are coyotes, who, in a Native American legend Conor Lyons’ father heard during his travels, yapped and howled the world into being. For Conor, his Irish father and Mexican mother are the songdogs, but the world their stories have bequeathed him has a hole in it: Why did she leave so abruptly when Conor was 12? Where did she go?

Colum McCann (“Fishing the Sloe-Black River”) begins this debut novel with Conor returning to Ireland after a five-year search for his mother, Juanita. His father, Michael, an itinerant photographer, had met her in Mexico after documenting the Spanish Civil War; later they went to San Francisco, Wyoming, New York and back to County Mayo, where Michael’s publication of erotic photos of his wife created a scandal.

McCann, for a young writer, has unusual control over his material. As Conor wanders in his parents’ vanishing footsteps, the two journeys overlap in descriptions that resonate like poetry and, seemingly by themselves, propel the plot. McCann’s take on the New World is fresh and often amusing, but what we remember most is the poignancy: Father and son estranged; a lover, artist and adventurer reduced to a sick old man fishing in a polluted stream.