FIRST FICTION

GOB’S GRIEF By Chris Adrian; Broadway Books: 384 pp.; $24.95

Chris Adrian’s heady first novel, set in New York after the Civil War and featuring such luminaries as Walt Whitman and Victoria Woodhull, is a surreal meditation on late-19th century intellectual chic: Spiritualism, feminism and science all seem to rise up from the ashes of war and the fading pastoral echoes of Emersonian transcendentalism; it’s as if the nation’s grief is responsible for the personal, cosmic and political obsessions that eventually power the country into the modern age. At the heart of this difficult psychic reconstruction is a curious enterprise: Gob Woodhull, the precocious young son of suffragist and presidential candidate Victoria, determines to build a machine to bring back the war dead, particularly his beloved brother Tomo, killed at Chickamauga. Gob is an entirely fictional character, and Adrian isn’t so much interested in historical precision as he is in distilling a national mood, albeit in deeply eccentric, personal terms. It’s a thrilling conceit, as when he uses Whitman’s own words to supply the bearded poet with dialogue in his friendship with Gob or when Will Fie, another of Gob’s associates, uses the photographic technology of the day to construct his own macabre shrine to the war’s victims. But Adrian’s effort is often akin to Gob’s: There’s a rag-and-bone quality to it, of disparate elements not quite successfully harnessed. Still, in the end, Adrian manages to bring back to life the brutal aftermath of the Civil War: an America still divided between future and past, living and dead.

P.E.A.C.E. By Guy Holmes; Simon & Schuster: 316 pp., $23

The New York of the not-too-distant future is a scary place: If the thought of Giuliani Park doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then how about surveillance cameras on every street corner and law enforcement officers equipped with tranquilizer guns ready to lay out would-be perps at the first sign of potentially criminal behavior? (I’m talking about the future, right?) Guy Holmes has taken the paranoia inspired by Rudolph Giuliani’s administration’s illegal strip searches and jaywalking crackdowns and has stretched it into a dystopia--the unavoidable word here--in which disturbing the peace has become something of a capital offense. Indeed, the “P.E.A.C.E.” of the title is an acronym for Police Enforced Anti-Crime Environment, the controversial anti-crime program that has put New York under a microscope. There’s a story here, too, amid this top-heavy Orwellian setup. It involves Mac Wells, a regular-guy cop who finds his job and city transformed by technology and the unease it inspires. When Mac accidentally shoots his partner, all hell breaks loose and Holmes sets in motion some classic--if weary--conspiracy stuff: Wells running from the cops, the Feds and a hired assassin in jogger mufti, not knowing who his friends and enemies are. “P.E.A.C.E.” is designed to highlight the possibility that a police state is already creeping up around us; unfortunately, the evidence from current events is more compelling--either as confirmation or refutation of this idea--than Holmes’ future schlock.

THE HIDING PLACE By Trezza Azzopardi; Atlantic Monthly Press: 282 pp., $24

“The Hiding Place” is one of those books in which the past and present are divided by a permeable membrane: Vignettes dissolve into one another across time in this understated novel about the Gaucis of Cardiff, Wales, a Maltese family whose youngest daughter, Dolores, is returning home after decades as a foster child and librarian. Dolores has an archivist’s unease with incompleteness. She’s here because her mother--who spent her life undergoing endless compromises, disappointments and breakdowns--has finally died, and as she steps from room to room in the dilapidated old Gauci place, the past returns in enigmatic waves: The fire set by her pyromaniac sister that left Dolores without fingers on her left hand; her father losing his business--and one of his six daughters--in a gambling debt; her mother carrying on illicit affairs in order to ward off creditors; her sister Celesta’s marriage to an odious man named Pippo, arranged, of course, by her father; and, finally, her father’s disappearance, ostensibly by boat to Malta. But much is left uncovered: “[M]y memory which cannot be trusted and which is all I have clings to me like mud.” Memory is not a clean exercise, as Dolores discovers, and her now grown-up sisters seem intent on stifling her investigations. This has always been their idea of a hiding place--to cut off their youngest, “crippled” sister from the crippling Gauci influences. In Trezza Azzopardi’s reckoning, the question of regaining or relinquishing the past becomes bracketed by the harder truth that you can’t really do either; it’s a powerful shade of gray, one that dominates this grimly lyrical tale of a splintered family.