FIRST FICTION

CAT’S MEOW By Melissa de la Cruz; Scribner: 222 pp., $13 paper

“Cat’s Meow” is so overtly calculated to be the beach read of the summer that a mere glance at its sherbet-hued packaging and urgent endorsements from Michael Musto and Todd Oldham is enough to make you wrinkle your nose. Consternation is short-lived, however. Melissa de la Cruz, a fashion editor at something called hintmag.com, has created a rambunctious first novel that deserves to have its every page encrusted with sand, its binding ringed with condensation from highball glasses. It’s about a downwardly mobile former child star, erstwhile model and pseudo-Upper East Side aristocrat Cat McAllister, a woman on the verge of 30 who’s incapable of growing up. At once calculating and clueless, Cat is a hilarious Virgil leading us down into New York’s rings of fashion hell, from birthday parties concocted to get next-day news coverage to the heroically underhanded Grub Street doings of upstart dot-coms. As Cat frantically pursues Stephan of Westonia, the eye-patch-wearing prince who offers an escape from her current financial embarrassments and does battle with witchy archrival Teeny Wong Finklestein Van der Hominie, a surprising thing happens: We somehow begin to care--if only slightly--about Cat and her shallow, name-droppers’ world of catwalks and Concordes. Writing in the zippy, breathless argot of Vogue and Vanity Fair, Cruz pinpoints the sinister vanities of this air-headed realm while making it all sound absurdly fun.

PROCESS By Kay Boyle; University of Illinois Press: 98 pp., $24.95

“I believe we can assert our own life, our own antithesis to what now exists.” Characters just don’t talk that way anymore, do they? This improbable sampling of dialogue comes from the recently unearthed first novel by Kay Boyle, one of the great--and underappreciated--American writers of the 20th century. Over the course of her 90 years, Boyle, who died in 1992, was variously known as an expat artiste, a clever agitator for modernism and, eventually, a literary grande dame whose astonishing stories decorated the pages of The New Yorker. In this minuscule novella, written when Boyle was in her early 20s and misplaced shortly thereafter, Boyle indeed asserts her own life, creating a precocious alter ego in Kerith Day. Kerith strains against the confines of Cincinnati like a terrier pup on a short leash: She’s all energy and will, and she can’t wait to break free. As she tries to disentangle herself from a conventional father and the expectations of office work, we see her attending labor meetings, having an epiphanic encounter with a poor black man and eventually succumbing to a sympathetic Frenchman and escaping to Europe. Uncharitably, this book could be called “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pain in the Neck”; for all her socialistic zeal, Kerith is as adolescent and egomaniacal as a Rand superhero. But Sandra Spanier’s erudite introduction is a helpful key to this difficult character and to the text, which has the broken-glass quality of modernist poetry. Spanier argues that in “Process” “syntax is subordinated to sense.” The contemporary reader, however, might feel that sense is subordinated to style, making this literary artifact as frustrating to read as it is fascinating to behold.

WAR STORY By Gwen Edelman; Riverhead: 168 pp., $21.95

Midway through Gwen Edelman’s bracing novella, it becomes clear that the title refers not only to the horrors and lingering scars of World War II but also to the heated relationship between Edelman’s twin protagonists: Kitty, a 32-year-old writer wannabe, and Joseph Kruger, an aging Viennese Jewish playwright with rapacious appetites--for food, for sex and for recounting his numerous past lives. What unfolds is the claustrophobic story of Kitty and Joseph’s protracted sexual agon, a weird mutual need that grows ever darker. Although they never seem to leave Joseph’s cramped apartment, Joseph’s rampant storytelling (as compulsive as his sex drive) takes them beyond New York, back to wartime Vienna, Amsterdam and Haifa, as he relates his survivor’s tale with a mixture of pride, self-disgust and stylized unsentimentality. For Kitty, it’s an education in her own suppressed Jewishness, in becoming a famous writer and in the ways of the flesh. Joseph, with his penchant for wolfing down big slabs of Limburger, liverwurst and salami, is the kind of repugnant yet irresistibly manly fellow you might expect to bump into in one of Anas Nin’s tales of erotic whimsy. But Edelman keeps firm control of this war story, packing every page with bold insinuations about lust, love, responsibility, aging and celebrity and about the way these two unlikely--and ultimately doomed--lovers find a sexual bond in remembering the Holocaust.