FIRST FICTION

The jacket of this sun-drenched mystery set in Hawaii contains so many comparisons to Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen that you wonder if those two eminent genre writers are pulling our legs: Could it be that this Corson Hirschfeld fellow is actually Leonard and Hiaasen on a collaborative busman’s holiday? This suspicion is quickly dispelled, however, when “Aloha, Mr. Lucky” gets rolling: Hirschfeld doesn’t quite hit the targets his blurb writers have given him, but he does manage to stake out some territory of his own in this unapologetically cartoon-like romp about an aging surfer and reporter named Star Hollie. Partially for kicks, and partially as research for Pacific Rainbow magazine, Star takes out a personal ad as “Mr. Lucky.” (He borrows the name from his border collie.)

What Star ends up attracting, however, is a whole monsoon of trouble and a cast of characters that could keep Hollywood in B-movies for years: There’s Michelle, the vampy widow of a mysteriously slain academic; a pair of menacing Appalachian twins who use Lemon Pledge and Pine Sol as toiletries; the Rev. Jaycie Pitts, a crooked televangelist bearing the cross of sexual blackmail; a mercenary with a weakness for classical music who tracks humans like a big-game hunter; and a debt-burdened businessman who dreams of creating a golf Mecca out of pristine volcano-side rain forest. For Star, a “haole through and through,” the ensuing knotty plot brings him into uncomfortably close contact with the angry volcano goddess Pele and with something called the Flying Vagina of Kapo. Dodging lava, legends and bullets, Star Hollie is a barely believable, yet memorably heroic goofball.

LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE By Karen E. Bender; Houghton Mifflin: 270 pp., $23

Midway through this novel about three generations of Los Angeles women, Ella--former shop girl, aging matriarch and recent widow--reiterates two rules to herself: “1. Allow yourself boundless hope” and “2. Do not let yourself be fooled by incorrect hope.” For Ella, her second daughter Vivien and her teenage granddaughter Shelley, the hazards of hope spring eternal in the form of first daughter Lena, a slow child who has grown up to be a retarded adult struggling to formulate her own rules of living. Lena’s childlike progress is by turns edifying and agonizing for Ella, Vivien and, perhaps most of all, Shelley, who forms an intense bond with Lena and her retarded truck-driver husband, Bob. (For Lena, marriage is an enviably simple equation: “I’m called Mrs.!” she squeals.) Moving from their own chaotic apartment to a residential home, Lena and Bob--despite the fact that preparing dinner and putting on underwear are small miracles--exist in a happy bubble of sex and love, until Bob, out on a ramble with Lena and Shelley, falls from an overpass to his death.

In the wake of this tragedy, Lena and Shelley hook up for an impromptu daylong adventure, going AWOL from their impossibly different heartaches as they hop a bus to Lahambra Beach. While Ella and Vivien search for these truants, Karen E. Bender, with brisk, uncluttered prose, expertly traces the family’s greater journey from the dawn of the century to the ‘70s, illuminating the often harsh working conditions of unconditional love.

HOW IT WAS FOR ME By Andrew Sean Greer; Picador USA: 212 pp., $23

In “Blame It on My Youth,” one of the 11 stories of Andrew Sean Greer’s impressive debut collection, Margaret and Pete--a straight woman and a gay man in their 20s--hook up at a Seattle rooftop party and embark on an extended desultory romance of convenience. “[T]hey amused themselves pretending, and it was their joke together against an unwitting world. But why? When had love itself turned into a secret prank?” Greer has a knack for showing how educated, upper-middle-class characters can get engaged in well-meaning deceptions. In “Cannibal Kings,” a rootless young WASP poses as the tutor of an anti-social Vietnamese boy named Trung, accompanying him on a tour of prep-school interviews and inventing improbable tales of his talents; “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” tells the story of a 1960s Ivy League beard marriage that, over the decades, turns uncomfortably real; in “The Art of Eating,” a middle-class woman gets a job in a fusty mansion, eating the rich exotic foods that an enfeebled widower can no longer consume and pretending she enjoys their strange flavors; in “Tipitu,” the narrator’s mom, playing the role of Pitti-Sing in a small-town production of “The Mikado,” forgets her lines and lapses into Ibsen: It’s hard to resist making metaphoric hay of this touching, hilarious moment. There are very few flubbed lines in Greer’s stark, delicate operettas, which are as clever as they are gravely real.