FIRST FICTION

Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, has written a searching yet ultimately mysterious novel about a Norwegian family with, oddly, some American roots. It’s narrated by twentysomething Karin, an unapologetic liar who believes “it’s actually necessary--to tell it not just like it is--but to tell it a little more than it is.” Despite her unreliability, Karin is a candid and prickly observer of family events and history, and what emerges here--in a string of well-turned flashbacks and flash-forwards from the ‘30s to now, from Brooklyn to Oslo--is a fragmented and affecting story about lies and the truth they tell about relationships. Karin’s father, a sympathetic but rather distant gent, is estranged from her mother, Anni, an irresistible blond who’s “not quite right in the head.” Julie, Karin’s big sister, has a knack for coming up with unsuccessful ways of doing herself in: electric hair dryer in the bathtub, sugar pills mistaken for Valium. But it’s Karin’s grandfather, Rickard Blom, who gets most of the headlines; he’s still the family patriarch, even though he exists only in photographs and stories, most of which recall his glory years in New York as a successful tailor and ladies’ man who made himself into an American “as only a true Norwegian can.” As Karin ponders long-ago--and current--infidelities, we’re never really sure what to make of her and her tall tales (one of her boyfriends turns into a mackerel), but Ullmann creates such a powerful mood of intimacy here that the reader feels like part of the family.

GOING TO POT A Novel By Jill Laurimore; St. Martin’s / Thomas Dunne: 340 pp., $24.95

Jill Laurimore was born in New York and raised in England, where she became a ceramicist, an art dealer and a television scriptwriter. Her entertaining first novel is a transatlantic comedy of bad manners and crumbling expectations that happens to involve ceramics and deal making and has a certain BBC polish to it. In 1987, an English couple, Fliss and Ivor Harley-Wright, find their home, ancient Little Watling Hall, in a state of accelerating decay: Stucco is falling off into the moat and the crack across their bedroom ceiling is starting to resemble a map of Italy. While the rest of the world gorges itself on lucrative stock deals, the perilously overdrawn Harley-Wrights (Fliss, Ivor, their three teenage kids and Ivor’s batty, recalcitrant mother, Titty) are reduced to a diet of letters from the local bank threatening bankruptcy. To halt the slide from genteel shabbiness to homelessness, Fliss and Ivor decide to sell off their prime asset: the Harry Harley-Wright Collection of Commemorative Drinking Vessels, a vast assemblage of antique kitsch amassed by Ivor’s late father. A reclusive American buyer is found, and his representative, uber-yuppie Tom Klaus, jets over to England to cement the deal and to provide a refreshingly crass New York counterpoint to the musty doings at Little Watling; Fliss finds herself drawn to Tom’s unbothered world, and she eventually flies to New York to have an impossibly surreal encounter with American riches, Wall Street raiders, speeding Porsches and a seriously out-of-control private zoo. Laurimore does piles it on a bit, but her cross-cultural commentary is always on the money, making this book--literally--a smashing good time.

SHADOW-BOX A Novel By Antonia Logue; Grove Press: 318 pp., $24

In this epistolary historical novel, Irish writer Antonia Logue imagines an unlikely exchange of letters between Mina Loy, a British painter who became a notable Modernist poet, and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. As correspondents, their mutual subject is Arthur Cravan, a Dadaist writer and semiprofessional boxer who was Oscar Wilde’s nephew, Jack’s closest friend and the love of Mina’s life. When Jack and Mina begin writing to each other in 1946, Arthur has been missing at sea for 28 years, and their correspondence--prompted by Jack’s finding an article about Mina in the morning paper--kindles quickly, moving from tentative hellos to the telling of full-blown life stories. Thus, we learn of Mina’s early unhappy marriage to a controlling dilettante painter; her exile in Italy, where, in 1913, she had an affair with F.T. Marinetti; and her move to New York, where she befriended Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams and, eventually, became the wife of Cravan, a dandified Adonis whose appetites for drink and women are legend-making. Jack, meanwhile, tells the even juicier story of his own rise to fame: his dominating title bouts against a hopeless string of Great White Hopes desperate to “ram the Golden Smile down Jack Johnson’s Golden Throat”; his taste for white women, prostitutes and fast cars; the government’s relentless efforts to nab him on bogus Mann Act charges; and his friendship with the enigmatic Cravan, whose real name, nationality and death are open to debate. Logue has discovered a fascinating--and largely forgotten--intersection of three notable early century lives, but these letters, in their prolixity, tend to be stagy and unconvincing. In the end, we’re left with a promising heavyweight story that, unfortunately, can’t go the distance.