FIRST FICTION

Jean Duprez, the yuppie heroine of Paul Griner’s first novel, is careful to establish the upper hand in all situations. She’s a Boston advertising executive who likes to give orders to her superiors, and she’s a shrewd operator at flea markets, where she spends her weekends scooping up rare antique pens--Greishabers, Watermans, Mont Blancs--from unsuspecting dealers. But her sense of invincibility is challenged when the dashing and enigmatic Steven Cain swoops down on her at her cousin’s wedding. An odd mating ritual ensues that begins with an afternoon’s sail (Steven doesn’t seem to do anything except pilot his ketch around Cape Ann), but which then grows increasingly ominous: sudden violent sex below decks, Jean’s hand crushed in a car door, no follow-up phone calls, candid long-distance photographs. We begin to get whiffs of abandoned fiancees and dead spouses--a veritable cabinet of creepiness lovingly curated by Steven, of whom Jean’s cousin unreassuringly says, “He has a lot of accidents.” Jean, meanwhile, has some skeletons of her own (childhood arson and other sketchy incidents) and, even as she begins to smell danger, she still believes she can control the “switch from being master of one’s fate to being its slave.” It’s this transition to victimhood--and its maddening layers of self-deception--that Griner handles with admirable aplomb. Despite the carefully controlled aura of mystery that dominates here, Griner, like Steven, is tauntingly open about his designs, making this slim novel not unlike one of Jean’s beloved pens: an irresistibly handsome object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.*

THE PLEASING HOUR By Lily King; Atlantic Monthly Press: 236 pp., $23

In Lily King’s inventive debut, a 19-year-old American girl named Rosie goes to live as an au pair with a Parisian family on their houseboat. There, on the banks of the Seine, Rosie experiences what must be universal for girls like her: that pinch-me-this-is-Paris feeling; learning to toss “chais pas” and “ouai” into her textbook French; meeting up with fellow au pairs in smoky boites; and, of course, trying to bond with the kids while keeping up with an endless string of chores that can never be performed well enough. In Rosie’s case, the impossible-to-please employer-mother is Nicole Tivot, an elegant and formidable woman who’s determined to hold Rosie at arm’s length; as Rosie puts it, “I had a strange suspicion she was fantasizing about clubbing me to death.” Conditions may be chilly, but they never quite reach that murderous level; even so, there’s a good bit of darkness here: Rosie, it turns out, has come to Paris after giving up a baby, and Nicole’s own childhood flight to Paris from the South of France remains a mystery. As a current of affection begins to flow rather dangerously between Rosie and Nicole’s husband Marc, Rosie is given the opportunity to head south to care for the elderly woman who raised Nicole, and she discovers that Nicole’s past--haunted by war, suicide and escape--may connect in some way to her own. King tells this haunting tale of surrogate histories and maternal betrayals with a narrative that slips among time, place and points of view; to her credit, she manages to perform this juggling act without breaking a sweat. *

WHY SHE LEFT US By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto; HarperCollins: 296 pp., $24

Family histories are full of inexplicable chapters that resist interpretation. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, in this enigmatic and engaging novel about three generations of a splintered Japanese American family, wisely leaves the mystery that drives her story intact, even as she explores it from every possible angle. For the Okadas, the unsolvable moment comes after the family has withstood internment at Santa Anita Racetrack during World War II. Emi, the wayward daughter of Kaori and Mitsuo Okada, moves to Hawaii with her new doctor-husband, but she takes only one of her two out-of-wedlock children with her--daughter Mariko, who grows up in relative comfort on the islands. Meanwhile, Emi’s abandoned son, Eric, is brought up in L.A. by his aging grandparents and his Uncle Jack, a hobbled U.S. veteran and mama’s boy who is forever measuring himself against his late older brother Will, a headstrong young man who, before becoming an American war hero, unambiguously labeled Emi a “whore.” Eric’s childhood is grounded, for better or worse, in Okada tradition, but he’s forced to change his grandfather’s diapers and turns into a minor hoodlum; Mariko discovers belatedly that she, too, has gotten a raw deal, having been raised apart from the family. By the time Eric and Mariko meet again, after 40 years of separation, the government is willing to offer reparations for internees, and Emi has ripened into a matriarch, making her earlier indiscretions even more unfathomable. In the end, we never really learn what makes Emi tick; Rizzuto uses the perspectives of Mariko, Eric, Jack and, most hauntingly, a disembodied Kaori to narrate this family’s jagged story, but their illuminations of Emi--as mother, sister and daughter--throw a good many shadows. Poking into these darkened corners, the various Okadas, often to their discomfort and amazement, find themselves.*