FIRST FICTION

INNOCENT IN THE HOUSE By Andy McSmith Verso: 312 pp., $23

Andy McSmith is the chief political correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and a former Labor Party press officer. His first novel is a comic gem, a kind of “Primary Colors” that shrewdly lays bare the day-to-day maneuverings of Parliament’s power elite. It’s about a junior member of Parliament named Joseph Pilgrim--handsome, good-hearted, swept into office with Labor’s 1997 landslide and absolutely clueless. When Joseph is given the opportunity to address the prime minister during question time, he stands before a teeming House of Commons, promptly forgets his party-fed question and babbles about the importance of heritage and tradition, leaving the prime minister flummoxed and his party enraged. But Joseph soon discovers that his bumbling has somehow made him a hot new political property, and “Innocent in the House” is off and running. What ensues is a series of escalating misadventures as Joseph engages party officers, spin doctors and, most sinisterly, the aggressive incursions of the notorious British tabloid press. Joseph is indeed an innocent in the House, but his missteps might just lead the press to some not-so-innocent episodes from his past, potentially wrecking his career, his marriage and his shot at having an affair with his 23-year-old assistant. “Innocent in the House” is all about Machiavelli in the age of Murdoch, about the public’s right to know and the politician’s right to suppress and about a parliamentary neophyte who unwittingly becomes a political force.

*

A False Sense of Well Being, By Jeanne Braselton, Ballantine: 336 pp., $23.95

“Turner, I’ve come to realize that my life is just an empty, gaping pit of despair and I wish you were dead.” This is Jessie Maddox, 38, of Glenville, Ga., thinking out loud. Turner is her husband. Glenville is a hell of cul-de-sacs and country clubs. And “A False Sense of Well Being,” Jeanne Braselton’s confident first novel, is a determinedly ambivalent depiction of love on the rocks in the New South that combines small-town charm with major-league angst. Jessie can’t really figure out why she’s suddenly having fantasies about wrecking balls crashing into her banker husband’s head, but the influence of her friends isn’t helping: There’s Donna, having a guilt-free affair with a younger man, and then there’s Wanda, a seemingly normal grandmother who just happens to have shot her husband to death. Although we never get the feeling that Jessie’s husband is in any real danger, we do suspect that Jessie is flirting with disaster. And when Jessie returns home to rural Alabama and her disapproving mother, her weekend visit turns into a down-home Proustian recherche search: for her former self, for her “Homo redneckus” origins, and even for the varieties of Southern religious experience. The object of Jessie’s mission--which, weirdly, climaxes with the theft of a stuffed headless duck from a local bar--isn’t merely to expose the false sense of well-being that keeps us all going. Jessie--and Braselton--in this entertaining, rueful account of an apparently “normal” marriage, eventually recognizes that false sense as something truer than we’d like to admit.

*

LAST YEAR’S RIVER, By Allen Morris Jones, Houghton Mifflin: 368 pp., $23

Allen Morris Jones’ debut is a novel of Wyoming, with its wide-open cattle ranches, fierce prairie winds and sweeping Maynard Dixon vistas. Yet, against this panoramic backdrop, what emerges is a rendering of smaller internal landscapes that are, in their way, no less grand. Jones’ heroine is 17-year-old Virginia Price, a headstrong New York debutante who arrives at a Wyoming ranch with her elderly aunt after a long journey in a Pullman sleeping car. It’s the early 1920s, and everything about “Last Year’s River” expertly conjures up this somewhat depressed pre-Depression era: World War I continues to throw its long shadow across the land, the flu epidemic is a not-so-distant memory and Prohibition has put the brakes on having fun. There’s an emotional austerity in the air, made all the more intense by the fact that Virginia has not come here on vacation but rather as an unwed girl pregnant from a rape. Ostensibly hiding out until she has the baby, Virginia finds that this exile from reality is swiftly imposing its own real-life demands: She’s falling for the ranch owner’s son, a diffident young cowhand and war vet who’s several rungs below Virginia’s station. This is textbook bittersweet melodrama, and Jones is sometimes overly fond of poeticisms, even when he’s describing mustard gas and sex crimes. But he is a fine storyteller, and he keeps this complex tale of cows and speak-easies, of Wyoming and Gramercy Park, moving along to a conclusion that’s as gritty as it is hopeful: “There are no happy endings only because there are no endings.”