FIRST FICTION

Willy Muller, an aging British writer living in Los Angeles, has a disarmingly straightforward opinion of his work: “How credibly I write schlock!” he exclaims upon browsing through his best-known work, “To Have and to Hold,” an opportunistic memoir of how he accidentally killed his wife during an argument in 1970. But Willy’s honesty is situational at best and, in this slim, acidic novel, events demand that Willy either sell out or own up to some pretty bitter truths. Recovering from a heart attack, Willy finds himself in the midst of his usual hack work: preparing a film treatment of “To Have and to Hold,” ghostwriting the autobiography of daytime television king--and bore--Reginald Boon. But his attentions are deflected by a far more stirring manuscript: his estranged daughter Sadie’s journal, which she sent to him just before committing suicide. Set against Willy’s constant, distracted musings on the encroachments of age (he’s obsessed with fiber and sexual performance), Sadie’s account of her childhood, her mother’s highly publicized death and her own desultory attempts to find love is haunting in its guilelessness and resignation. Willy is forced to confront everything he’s spent his sunny exile avoiding: his nonexistent relationship with Sadie, the consequences of the long-ago deadly argument and his own increasing inability to churn out a decent sentence. Zoe Heller’s first novel is a shrewdly funny portrayal of a first-class curmudgeon forced to get in touch with--and atone for--the true jerk within.

THE TESTAMENT OF YVES GUNDRON; By Emily Barton; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 304 pp., $25

Emily Barton’s inventive debut at first appears to be a literary artifact unearthed from medieval Europe: the works and days of a village called Mandragora lovingly recorded by Yves Gundron, a yeoman farmer scratching out subsistence on a small parcel of land with his small family. Although Yves is clever enough to improve upon the one-wheeled cart that has had all of Mandragora stuck in its primitive rut, he has no real idea of the outside world. Neither do we--until an immodestly dressed woman arrives in Mandragora speaking English in an accent that “cut through the air like the ploughshare through the sod.” The intriguing stranger is Ruth Blum of Cambridge, Mass., a grad student in anthropology who has been searching for this mythic mother lode of research potential located off the coast of Scotland on an impenetrably mountainous island. What ensues is a tale of era clash spun out by a narrator who is as wise as he is stubbornly naive; through Yves’ eyes, we see Ruth scandalizing the Gundrons by making toast, having an audience with the rather silly Archduke Urbis of Nnms, and growing closer to Yves’ mystical brother, Mandrik. Although the Mandragorans remain suspicious of the outsider in their midst, they gradually, and unexpectedly, embrace the modernity that Ruth has brought, even as she hopelessly tries to protect them from it. Barton’s novel isn’t about postmodern gamesmanship; it’s a heartfelt vision of a hardscrabble Shangri-La on the verge of being hauled into the shocking light of the present.

EATING THE CHESHIRE CAT; By Helen Ellis; Scribner: 288 pp., $23

Helen Ellis’ murderously comic novel--which is bright as bubble gum even as it bats around issues of infidelity, betrayal, molestation and self-mutilation--traces the dysfunctional entanglement of three girls growing up around Tuscaloosa, Ala. Sarina Summers is an expert manipulator whose only flaw is her weirdly bent fingers, which her mother corrects by bringing an ax down on them on the eve of Sarina’s 16th birthday. Our sympathy for Sarina quickly evaporates, however, when we go back a few years to summer camp and see Sarina threaten to tear apart Bitty Jack Carlson’s family with bogus accusations of voyeurism against her father, Camp Chickasaw’s maintenance man. Bitty Jack is a sweet, geeky girl without the scary Stepford presumptions of Sarina and her sidekick, Nicole Hicks, the daughter of Tuscaloosa’s esteemed anchorman. Nicole’s mother rivals Mrs. Summers in the overbearing department, and the two women maintain a tense detente across Cheshire Way, the neat thoroughfare that runs between their households. The fierce competition for middle-class superiority takes its toll: Nicole eventually comes unraveled and Sarina, to no one’s surprise, becomes more and more of a nightmarish oppressor, egged on by the evils of sorority life at the University of Alabama. Bitty Jack, meanwhile, hooks up with Sarina’s ex-boyfriend, thus cranking the incestuousness to a dangerously incendiary level. This breezy tale about old-fashioned back-stabbing in the New South is meant to be gobbled up; Faulkner it ain’t, but Ellis entertains as easily as whistling “Dixie.”