FIRST FICTION

SINATRALAND; By Sam Kashner; (The Overlook Press: 192 pp., $22.95)

First the Sands, and then you, Frank; seems like everything good in this mixed-up world is checking out at the same time. If you were still around, I wonder what you’d make of this book by the Kashner kid. If you ask me, I think the guy writes about as good as you paint, Francis, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It’s about Finkie Finkelstein, the guy who wrote you all those unanswered letters for so many years. You remember him, don’t you Frank? He represented the Weiss & Rifkind window-shade company, and he owned the biggest house in Fort Lee, the one that once belonged to Buddy Hackett. The guy was nuts about you, Frank; he and his first wife, Jill, named their daughter Nancy Ava, after your first two ex-wives, and he once told you that “Mr. William Shakespeare doesn’t deserve to carry your jockstrap.” I swear, the guy’s funnier than Joey Bishop sometimes. But seriously, Francis, Finkie’s got a point when he talks about what your boys did to him backstage after one of your farewell performances. That wasn’t very nice, and you can quote me, but I was truly touched when, after Finkie regained the ability to walk, you brought him into your inner circle. That, Francis, is what class is all about, and Sam Kashner’s got it all here in this little book. If you were still with us, Frank, you’d sleep the sleep of kings knowing that the art of book writing is safe in his hands.

BY THE SHORE; By Galaxy Craze; (Atlantic Monthly: 232 pp., $24)

This is the delicate tale of an off-season by the sea, as experienced by 12-year-old May, who lives, along with her half-brother Eden, in a bed-and-breakfast run by their mother, Lucy. Despite the trio’s remove from the bustle and glamour of ‘70s London, the city is ever-present, as May pines for her old bedroom there and as Lucy’s party-girl friends--who refer to the various Rolling Stones by their first names--drop in to remind Lucy of everything she’s missing. But another refugee from the city, a writer named Rufus, drinks in the quietude of the B & B as if it were pure oxygen; May begins to wonder--rightly, too--if there might be something developing between her mom and the kindly, elusive lodger. Their courtship, as seen through May’s hopeful eyes, has all the awkwardness of the real thing--until May’s velvet-suited absentee father arrives from London in a zippy sports car. As May’s loyalties begin to drift, you get the sense of a child confronting her first choices and, in May’s words, of “letting the brightest purple kite fall down from the sky.” Galaxy Craze draws these characters with a feathery touch, just light enough to trace the essentials without leaving a smudge.

FLEUR DE LEIGH’S LIFE OF CRIME; By Diane Leslie; (Simon and Schuster: 302 pp., $23)

Diane Leslie’s debut, about a girl with the improbable name of Fleur de Leigh, is a winning evocation of Beverly Hills in the ‘50s. Amid this gilded wonderland, Fleur is a sort of precocious show-biz Eloise; she is as independent as she is innocent, a condition imposed upon her by her aloof parents: Charmian, the insouciant star of “The Charmian Leigh Radio Mystery Hour” and speaker of fluent franglais; and Maurice, the producer of the hilariously cruel television game show “Sink or Get Rich.” As imposing as this duo is (their self-regard rivals that of Sartre and de Beauvoir), Fleur’s upbringing is left to the relative strangers who drift into--and out of--the Leighs’ mansion. There’s Glendora, the voluptuous nanny whose engagement to a strong silent cop is derailed by Charmian’s sexual imperialism; Miss Hoate, another nanny who is convinced that chenille bedspreads pose a health risk; Gilda, who runs a psychodrama workshop for the pre-pubescent overstimulated youth of Hollywood; and Thea Roy, a legend of the silent era who comes to roost chez Leigh at the end of her life. Leslie reveals a world that’s as shiny and as frozen as a game-show host’s smile and a little girl who navigates it with heartening savvy.

HADRIAN’S WALLS; By Robert Draper; (Alfred A. Knopf: 326 pp., $23)

As a Texas Monthly reporter, Robert Draper became intimate with Huntsville, an East Texas town where keeping criminals behind bars is big business. In his fiction debut, Draper transforms Hunstville into Shepherdsville, a place where “[p]risons fed money to the core, money to the outskirts, money everywhere” and where a kindhearted soul named Hadrian Coleman has had a particularly sticky relationship with the local industry. At 15, Hadrian kills a man who is about to kill his best friend, Sonny, the goofball son of the blustery honcho of Shepherdsville’s prisons, Thunderball Hope. For this act of bloody Samaritanism, Hadrian receives a stiff prison sentence and serves most of it as a servant in the Hopes’ mansion. From this cushy yet cruel vantage point, Hadrian watches as Sonny grows up, steals and marries the girl he’s in love with and destroys his father’s career. Eventually, Hadrian escapes and lives for years as a fugitive until a pardon is secured for him by Sonny, who, meanwhile, has usurped control of Shepherdsville and, it seems, of Hadrian’s freedom. Despite a convoluted narrative, Draper admirably reports the doings of this bizarre town and the chain of indebtedness and resentment that links its inhabitants.

BUXTON SPICE; By Oonya Kempadoo; (Dutton: 170 pp., $21.95)

This novelette, set in a village called Tamarind Grove in Guyana, is as juicy and ripe as the fruits drooping from the Buxton Spice mango tree that grows outside the home of Lula, Oonya Kempadoo’s saucy girl heroine. Lula resents the Buxton Spice tree for all the secrets that it holds; its limbs seem to reach into every corner of Tamarind Grove. But Lula--who is a mix of Indian, black and white--is not so unlike this spying tree: She and her friends are constantly watching through cracked fences and parted leaves to gather information about Bullet, Sugar Baby and Rumshop Cockroach, “the three whores of Tamarind Grove”; the DeAbros, a sprawling pig-farming Portuguese family; Sexy Marilyn, who entertains boys in a boarded-up schoolroom; and Comrade Burnham, Guyana’s arm-breaking dictator, whose presence threatens Lula’s family. Lula’s father, Dads, is a bookish sort, typified by “nonviolence, no cruelty to animals, soya and long-hair flowing”; the family is “good broughtupsy” but, to the government, it becomes a suspected pocket of opposition. Kempadoo’s Caribbean argot is precise and fluid, enriching this debut with bawdiness, violence and raucous humor.