FIRST FICTION

EAST BAY GREASE; By Eric Miles Williamson; (Picador: 248 pp., $23)

Things have a way of going awry for T-Bird Murphy, the young hero of Eric Miles Williamson’s fiercely comic first novel, which is set in Oakland in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He’s raised by a mother who is unaccountably fond of the Hell’s Angels; while the bikers are given the run of the house (fully equipped with a 10-nosed hookah), T-Bird is held to another standard: As punishment for munching a P.B.J. between meals, his mother irons his hands. T-Bird goes to live in a trailer behind a gas station with his ex-con father, once a promising trumpeter and now a grease monkey striving to keep T-Bird in line. T-Bird learns how to change oil and, more important, how to get even, but his bad luck and poor judgment continue to dog him: When he steals his best friend’s baseball cards, his shame-faced attempts to return them are derailed; when the school jazz band has the opportunity to win a competition in Reno, T-Bird, the lead trumpet, is, hilariously, too hung-over to play. But it’s his father’s overdeveloped sense of payback that ignites a savage feud with a Mexican family, allowing deeper tragedies to unfold in this rough-and-tumble debut.*

LIFE IN THE AIR OCEAN; By Sylvia Foley; (Alfred A. Knopf: 162 pp., $21)

The air ocean of Sylvia Foley’s challenging debut story collection refers to the oxygen-rich atmosphere that envelops the Earth. It’s a place where, for the Mowry family of Carville, Tenn., the very act of breathing contains the threat of drowning and suffocation. Daniel Mowry grew up in Massachusetts during the Depression; in “Boy Wonder,” he tries, unsuccessfully, to take flight in the backyard while his mother metes out kisses through the mesh of a screen door. With such a frigid Yankee upbringing, it’s no wonder Daniel grows up to be a refrigeration engineer. Still, he’s drawn to warmer climes; he marries Iris, a self-hating nurse from Memphis who eats only eggs, and moves to Tennessee; in “Elemenopy” we find them living “on a dead end road.” When, in “Cloudland,” they’ve moved to Colombia, the tropics offer no relief: “[O]n the antiplano, living on thin air, they were prisoners of altitude.” Foley refuses to allow the Mowrys any way out. When daughter Ruth runs her head into a concrete wall, we suspect that the bad behavior has been handed down to the next generation; the assumption is borne out in “A History of Sex,” which finds Ruth, now an undergraduate, hawkish on both Vietnam and impersonal sex. Foley’s stories are relentlessly grim, but they glint with cold, steely wisdom.

EAST OF A; By Russell Atwood; (Ballantine: 212 pp., $22)

Russell Atwood’s East Village noir is an amusing update on the hard-boiled New York of Mickey Spillane, complete with bungling hoodlums, club kids on designer drugs and a bratty 16-year-old named Gloria Manlow who manages to engage the sympathy of Payton Sherwood, our intrepid gumshoe, who always “wanted to grow up and be a Forties black-and-white private eye.” Payton’s surroundings, however, are pure Technicolor, and half the fun of this book is Payton’s running commentary on downtown Manhattan; he’s a refreshingly nerdy straight-man against the self-consciously zany background of the Village. Payton first encounters Gloria, a teenage runaway, as she’s being mugged on East Eleventh Street; Payton moves in on her attackers, wielding a gallon of milk, and is rewarded with a first-class beating. While he’s down for the count, Gloria peels off his Rolex and disappears. What begins as a search for a gold watch and a mysterious girl ends up with a growing body count and an increasingly tangled web of dubious activity spun from the Hellhole, a dance club in a de-consecrated church. Like Payton, Atwood has a keen eye for the local color, with its leering pit-bulls, disdainful doormen, and platform-sneakered partiers.

THE POLLEN ROOM; By Zoe Jenny; Translated from the German by Elizabeth Gaffney; (Simon and Schuster: 144 pp., $20)

This haunting coming-of-age tale is told by a girl named Jo, but her name is almost an after-thought, as if Zoe Jenny wants us to imagine her smart, wayward heroine either as a stand-in for an entire generation or as a solitary teen whose travails hardly register a blip on the radar. A sense of emotional anonymity pervades these pages, as Jo tries--with varying degrees of intensity and success--to know her parents, her few friends and herself. She grows up in a nameless Swiss town with her father, a writer and publisher of high-minded books that stack up, unread, in their cramped apartment. He throws parties at which young Jo watches the older folks drink booze and groove to the Stones; the vibe is Paris ’68 warmed-over, yet the grown-ups’ intentions are, on the whole, benign. Even her mother’s absence doesn’t seem much more than an oversight, but it’s one that Jo decides to correct after a 12-year lapse in which she’s grown from a shy, independent girl into a young woman whose perception of the nuances that bind people (usually loosely) is as sharp as her ambition is dull. Jenny, 24 and Swiss herself, illuminates the disturbing stasis at the heart of adolescent rootlessness.

THUMBELINA; By Andrea Koenig; (Scribner: 286 pp., $22)

“I am pretty normal lookin,’ ” says Thumbelina Skylar, a 14-year-old girl from Tacoma who loves Johnny Cash and whose mother recently died in an auto accident. Thumbelina reports details as a teenage pen-pal might; she gets the facts down plainly, yet there’s always more going on under the surface. For instance, Thumbelina is actually almost 6-feet tall, has “yellow hair that looks like pee” and a pair of colossal feet. While her catty girlfriends throw swimming parties, Thumbelina stays under the covers of her bed, sings “Folsom Prison Blues” to herself and, after her mother’s death, lands in foster care. Here, she adopts an abandoned dog and a best friend--a pregnant redhead named Myrna. Together (minus the dog) they end up working in a strip club until it dawns on Thumbelina that she can no longer hide that she, too, is pregnant. Against the unfolding nine months of her pregnancy, Thumbelina mulls over her brief life. We learn that her mother’s boyfriend was abusive, gay, had AIDS and is the father of Thumbelina’s “fish.” Thumbelina’s one tough cookie, and Koenig wisely gives her enough fighting spirit to keep this affecting meditation on youth and doom from caramelizing into melodrama.