FACE-TIME; By Erik Tarloff; (Crown: 240...

FACE-TIME; By Erik Tarloff; (Crown: 240 pp., $23)

Erik Tarloff, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, has written a hilarious tale of high cuckoldry and misdemeanors in an oddly familiar White House. Ben Krause and Gretchen Burns are on their way to becoming a Washington power couple. Young and high-minded, their romance blooms just as their work for the Sheffield campaign pays off, sweeping the bald, ruggedly handsome Democratic candidate into office. Ben earns a position as Sheffield’s speechwriter, while Gretchen, the daughter of a blowhard, Republican ex-Congressman, lands a job in the White House social office.

Ben’s insider position gives him plenty of coveted “face-time” with the President, but he soon discovers that Gretchen is enjoying even greater proximity; she’s sleeping with the President, and, despite her love for Ben, has no intention of stopping. When a British reporter with a nose for sleaze begins circling, Ben is forced, after months of comical anguish, to act. Afterward, he realizes that “for all my wussiness up to that moment, I at least burn my bridges with a certain panache.” Tarloff gets the slowly curdling atmosphere of the couple’s Dupont Circle condo--and Ben’s powerlessness before a situation that threatens to destroy his career, his love life, and his ego--just right.

THE INTUITIONIST; By Colson Whitehead; (Anchor: 256 pp., $19.95)

Lila Mae Watson, a graduate of the prestigious Institute of Vertical Transport, is the first “colored” elevator inspector in a nameless city. She is steeped in theory: Her cohorts at the Institute discuss “the psychology of the Door Close button,” the way other undergraduates dissect Lacan’s Mirror Stage. But Watson also excels at practice, earning a flawless inspection record despite her espousal of controversial Intuitionist techniques.

When an elevator she has recently inspected free-falls, her record is suddenly tarnished. She suspects the opposing camp, the Empiricists, of sabotage, and of setting her up as a scapegoat. Able to see an elevator’s machinations in her mind’s eye, Watson is not so well equipped to deal with the conspiracies that begin to swirl around her. Perhaps the truth lies buried in the notebooks of James Fulton, the founder of Intuitionism; or with the conniving Frank Chancre, the Empiricist candidate for the Guild presidency; or with Johnny Shush, a mobster whose henchman have a flair for snapping people’s fingers off. This brainy thriller diverts more than it excites, but Colson Whitehead masterfully evokes a grey mid-century city that could have been torn from a Ben Katchor comic strip.

ORIGINAL BLISS; By A. L. Kennedy; (Alfred A. Knopf: 224 pp., $21)

“Mrs., um, Brindle?” asks Edward E. Gluck, thus breaking the ice on the weirdest love story in recent memory. Mrs. Brindle--middle-aged, Scottish--has “lost the power of reaching out.” Her life is dwindling away under the repetitive strain of housework and the intermittent, violent outbursts from the unpleasantly hirsute Mr. Brindle. Gluck is a motor-mouthed self-help guru who makes the chat-show rounds hawking “Gluck--The New Cybernetics,” which Mrs. Brindle picks up at the local bookshop. Intrigued by his “Process” (and telegenic looks), she writes him a letter that leads to a meeting at a conference in Stuttgart. He takes an eager liking to his listless fan; Mrs. Brindle manages to sputter out a few half-formed syllables.

What follows seems, at first, like an excruciatingly slow seduction, masterminded by Gluck. That he is putting himself through aversion therapy for his addiction to pornography is not entirely reassuring, but Gluck, who confesses that “My life is neither wild, nor exotic, just massively embarrassing,” may well be looking for more than just someone to watch videos with, and Mrs. Brindle may not be the repressed innocent she thinks she is, making this an important debut from a young, award-winning Scottish writer.

THE NARROWBACK; By Michael S. Ledwidge; (Atlantic Monthly: 240 pp., $24)

In this hard-nosed, fast-paced, cinematic shoot-’em-up, Tom Farrell is a 30-year-old ex-jailbird, returned home to the Irish district of the Bronx, where locals enjoy pints of Guinness, Gaelic Football matches and have a taste for crime. Farrell is acutely aware of the unfairness of his fate; once bound for a private-school education and an art career, circumstances--familial troubles, the bad influence of the neighborhood, his brother’s death from AIDS--have filled him with an avenging anger that focuses itself on “one daring act of discipline and intelligence”: a scheme to empty the coffers of a posh Manhattan hotel. He is a likeable mastermind, especially compared to the riff-raff around him, and he becomes a more likeable lone wolf when one of his partners, who turns out to be an IRA thug, ends up in the river and Farrell must elude the IRA’s suspicion and penchant for exercising extreme prejudice. Toss in the fact that Farrell pistol-whips a glib Albanian mobster, and you’ve got a fool-proof recipe for trouble. Ledwidge keeps the adrenalin pumping, and, in Farrell, he manages to create a compelling character who, in lazier hands, could have been cut from cardboard.

SKINSWAPS; By Andrej Blatnik; Translated from the Slovenian by Tamara Soban; (Northwestern University Press: 110 pp., $14.95 paper)

The 16 stories in this debut collection by Andrej Blatnik have the quality of overtures or interludes; they remain stubbornly on the verge. Likewise, the young people who populate these pages seems at once under-committed and over-committed.

In “Scratches on My Back,” an architect who listens to bootlegs of the Smiths is unable to prevent his apartment from being hijacked by the wife of a former colleague; in “The Taste of Blood,” a cyclist named Katarina comes across a drowned girl and becomes the object of creepy insinuations from a pair of cops; in “Actuality,” a couple debating whether or not they should go to a party find their inquiry escalating to topics of being, nothingness and, ultimately, their compatibility; in “Damp Walls,” a woman believes, according to “research in the U.S.,” that success means having at least two boyfriends; and, in “Kyoto,” a furry caterpillar becomes a player in a dispute between two friends over the connection between tea drinking and nature. For all the triangulations, Blatnik’s people are nomads who hold the world at bay, but who, despite their efforts to become “Richard Burton starring as Tito,” cannot achieve total control.