FIRST FICTION

Victor D. LaValle’s debut stories span the various corners of New York City, and his characters--generally young and in flux, like Anthony, the recurring hero of the latter half of the book--tend to roam around in small packs from incident to incident, borough to borough. There’s a connectedness to these episodic urban tales: They all share a similar jagged rhythm, and together in “Slapboxing With Jesus” they gradually generate a feeling of convincing familiarity, as LaValle envelops us in his world. Yet what’s most striking here isn’t the abundant overlaps but rather the disconnections and breakdowns that continually aggravate the surface of this collection and the lives of the people who inhabit it. The narrator of “Ghost Story” tries in vain to remain whole by compulsively hoarding his own used Kleenexes and by saving his urine in bottles. In “Ancient History,” two old friends take turns telling the story of their unsolvable competitiveness as they ditch the neighborhood, parting ways forever. In “Trinidad,” the young Anthony is shipped off to the Caribbean when it is feared he might be gay. “How I Lost My Inheritance” finds Anthony back home discovering another layer of ethnic identity while his Ugandan mother--who has invented a way to keep bathroom tile clean--confronts her shady patent lawyer. In “Class Trip,” Anthony, now in 10th grade, pines for his girlfriend while accompanying his buddies on a cruise for hookers along the West Side Highway. If LaValle’s chronicles of “future janitors and supermarket managers, plumber’s assistants and deliverymen of the United States” tend to skid around the road and end up in 10-anecdote pile-ups, it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off the wreckage.

*

THE DESPERATE SEASON

A Novel

By Michael Blaine

Rob Weisbach Book: 292 pp., $24

In this snowbound literary noir, a young schizophrenic named Maurice Coleman slips through the cracks of a mental health facility in February, 1990 and, after buying a cheap-o semiautomatic, takes his family hostage at a Catskills vacation cabin. The events surrounding this unexpected yet seemingly unavoidable rampage are told by various friends and family members and, as each of them is forced to confront Maurice’s ostentatious crime, they begin to probe, like amateur detectives of the self, their own buried, human crimes. There’s Vince, a New York lawyer driving upstate for a ski weekend with his son; as Vince is pulled into the crisis, we learn that he’s been involved in a “twenty-year one-night stand” with Maurice’s mother, Moira, a self-involved Woodstock type who does topiary and who alternately obsesses about and denies the existence of her ex-husband Nathan. Nathan is Maurice’s father, a local banker addicted to gambling on sporting events; his odds-taker’s optimism extends to Maurice, whom he handles with nearly pathological kindness and patience. Julia, Moira’s best friend, gives us flashbacks to 1987, when she and Nathan lapse into a brief affair, and Carrie, Maurice’s teenage sister, ponders her sexuality as she combs the past for incidents that may have put Maurice on his murderous path. Then there’s the jolting narration of Maurice himself, his brilliance turned dangerously blistering by mental illness; as he shoots holes in the roof of the cabin, he conjectures that Max Planck--and others closer to home--may be his biological father. Michael Blaine handles this chorus of voices with astonishing ease, and not an ounce of adrenaline escapes “The Desperate Season,” a tightly wound tale of familial recriminations gone starkly criminal.

*

JUMPING THE GREEN

A Novel

By Leslie Schwartz

Simon & Schuster: 270 pp., $23

Louise Goldblum, a 29-year-old San Francisco-based artist, has reached a career high point; critics are cranking out praise by the yard. “Goldblum is fast emerging as the leader of a new generation of nihilistic postmodernists” and she’s just been invited to install her work at the prestigious De Young Museum. On the verge of this leap forward, Louise suddenly finds herself doing a self-destructive backpedal: Her installation refuses to come together; she develops a perilous taste for vodka and she takes a violent baldheaded lover named Zeke, an S & M photographer who woos her with terror and humiliation. But Louise’s drinking and dating habits are merely symptoms of a larger, inexpressible sorrow: the recent death of her big sister, Esther, shot by an unknown man in a seedy motel on the eve of her leaving for South Africa to work as a New York Times reporter. Between bouts of welt-raising lovemaking with Zeke, Louise recalls growing up in the Goldblum household alongside Esther and their three other siblings. With the various parental adulteries, alcoholisms and emotional distances, it looks a lot like Cheeverdom, a condition that the teenage Esther tries to escape via the requisite hoodlum boyfriend. As the deadline for her installation looms, Louise brings together all the volatile loose ends of her family’s life into what could either be a masterpiece or a career-ending debacle. Leslie Schwartz, too, has a lot to juggle in “Jumping the Green,” but she gets the overheated atmosphere of the fringe art world just right in this erotic story of a grieving woman steering a dangerous course between sex and love, pain and pleasure, victimhood and survival.