FIRST FICTION

The slab in the title of Ted Heller’s comedy about mid-level back-stabbing in the publishing world is the gleaming, soul-deprived Manhattan tower that houses the Versailles publishing empire, home to such popular magazines as She, Her and It. There, amid stultifying ecru walls and life-sucking cubicles, labor the so-called rats, including Heller’s conniving hero, Zachary Post, who has become trapped in It’s corporate maze somewhere between editorial assistant and the elusive Valhalla of senior editor. Although Zachary feels that “there are a few things in each issue of It that make me want to hang myself with the nearest shoelace,” he’s still pretty hung up on the place, masking his Long Island pedigree with tales of Palm Beach and an English education, taking a keen interest in the newest New Girl and dutifully cranking out pieces full of words like “faux,” “manque” and “wunderkind.” All three terms could apply to recent recruit Mark Larkin, a young dandy with a Teddy Roosevelt smile and a shamelessly Machiavellian game plan. Soon enough, Zachary and his cube mate, Willie, are seething with murderous jealousy at Larkin’s swift and truly evil rise to power. It’s true that publishing is one wide, lumbering target. Even so, Heller, a veteran of the glossies himself, has dead-on comic aim in this story about a guy who, in his determination to get even, comes to the empowering realization that he’s every bit as despicable as his nemesis.

BACK ROADS; By Tawni O’Dell; Viking: 352 pp., $24.95

In a brief introductory essay, Tawni O’Dell, the author of this novel of murder, incest and recovered memory in the western Pennsylvania mining country, refers to “being an educated woman living in a stripper’s body and saddled with a biker chick’s name.” Although this might be more than we need to know, the hero of O’Dell’s first novel, Harley Altmyer, is similarly torn by identity. He’s a 19-year-old kid stocking shelves at the local Shop Rite, yet beneath the unextraordinary trappings of teen life, Harley copes with extraordinary, horrific circumstances: Because his mother went to prison for shooting and killing his father, Harley has had to hold the Altmyer household together. His three sisters--youngest Jody (who constantly leaves twee, misspelled notes lying around), mysterious middle kid Misty and 16-year-old sexually ambitious Amber--are by turns helplessly dependent and brattily resentful. Talking to his state-appointed shrink doesn’t help; neither does joking about road kill with the locals. When it finally seems that Harley might find deliverance in the form of an illicit tryst with the sophisticated mother of Jody’s best friend (she gives him art books and home cooking to supplement his television and snack food diet), the heightened sexual atmosphere only serves to resurrect long-buried fears and suspicions in Harley. Did Harley’s mom really kill his father? And did Harley somehow encourage Amber’s compulsive sexual behavior? We’ll find out after these messages. O’Dell’s storytelling has natural flair, but “Back Road,” a kind of brutal, Appalachian “Party of Five,” never quite makes it out of the thick woods of its own Oprah-fied obsessions.

TEA; By Stacey D’Erasmo; Algonquin: 318 pp., $21.95

In this delicate novel of triangulations, Stacey D’Erasmo tells the story of Isabel Gold, the questioning and questing daughter of a suburban Philadelphia dry cleaner, as a triptych; each free-standing panel depicts another phase of Isabel’s life, from the Vietnam era to the early ‘80s. In the first, 8-year-old Isabel builds a model of a Roman villa for school, assesses the handsomeness of Maxwell Smart with her stridently Baptist friend, Ann, and, through the gauzy lens of girlhood, observes the last days of her mother’s life. Next, we find Isabel at 16, working at Pier 1 and reflecting on her mother’s suicide: “All she did was watch General Hospital in the afternoons, in a trance. If she did have potential, she died clutching it in her hands. . . .” Isabel now forces herself to choose between Lottie, her joint-rolling, kick-ass high-school buddy, and Rebecca, an intense young actress in a fringe theater company. Finally, we catch up with Isabel living with her lover, Thea, on the Lower East Side, where she has graduated to lentil-stew lesbianism and a fierce drive to make a plotless, dogmatic film about the Roman goddess Diana. While Thea gets up to no good with a shifty girl named Cricket, Isabel heads home for Hanukkah and re-encounters all the numbing practicality that drove her mom off the deep end. In this last panel, D’Erasmo expertly evokes everything it is to be 22, and, throughout “Tea” (the title refers to Isabel’s mother’s euphemism for booze), there’s a refreshingly old-fashioned concern with the life-and-death stakes of self-realization.