HEAD FIRST FICTION

THE SALT LETTERS By Christine Balint, W.W. Norton: 190 pp., $12 paper

Christine Balint is a young Australian writer whose debut--about a woman making the difficult voyage from England to Australia in 1854--was undertaken as an honors thesis at the University of Melbourne. Although “The Salt Letters” can, at times, feel like a project, it’s a remarkably assured novella, in which undergraduate seriousness is tempered by the kind of delicate observations you can’t learn at school. Balint’s heroine is Sarah, a girl as enigmatic as the sea. What we know of her comes in gauzy flashbacks that gradually sketch the life she’s left behind in Shropshire: tales from a seafaring grandfather, familial expectations of an arranged marriage, joyful dalliances with her cousin Richard and finally, at Richard’s urging, a dash to Birkenhead and the next ship to Australia. It’s Sarah’s passage in steerage that preoccupies Balint, a lonely journey on which below-decks misery is depicted with dreary realism interspersed with fantastical tales a la “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: A distressed seaman mounts a white mare and rides into the sea; a sailor eats the feet of an albatross and suffers visions of flying. As the ship makes its agonizing progress through the doldrums and on toward New Holland, we witness Sarah and the other single women trying to maintain Victorian propriety amid stifling heat and shivering cold, mounting filth and illness, with a pig roaming among their berths. Balint’s writing is seductively impressionistic and, even when she’s giving history lessons, she teases with suggestion: of Sarah’s future with Richard, of her possible pregnancy and of a stormy crisis in which Sarah’s fate--and the ship’s--are held in the balance.

WHERE WE LIVED By Christina Fitzpatrick, HarperCollins: 262 pp., $24

“Springfield, Massachusetts, with its dull straight streets, with its plastic factories that spit out black smoke which grazed across our skies while we sat Indian-style in empty parking lots, fiddling with pieces of shattered glass, feeling listless, tired, bored.” Christina Fitzpatrick’s debut is an updated “Winesburg, Ohio,” for the Lifetime channel set. It traces the lives of girls growing up amid the bland geography of an all-American burg that isn’t exciting enough to be a city or quaint enough to be a small town. Similarly, the book aims squarely for in-betweeness: Its thinly connected episodes don’t quite scan as chapters in a novel and they don’t hold up as short stories, either. And the five girls portrayed here--whose listless, tired, bored lives sometimes intersect and sometimes don’t--are largely indistinguishable from one another. Maybe these blurry heroines are meant to be as generic as their hometown, or maybe the author is trying to suggest that all women suffer the same fate at the hands of absentee dads, husbands, brothers and boyfriends. After all, the men of Springfield seem to be dead, missing or, if they do have the nerve to stick around, total jerks. Although Fitzpatrick writes in an engagingly conversational tone with flashes of genuine humor, we never feel intimate with these young women. And the book’s final chapter--a piece of writing by one of Fitzpatrick’s characters about, of all things, David Letterman--is just plain bizarro, ending this perplexing effort on a strained, baffling and extraneous note..

SPECTACULAR HAPPINESS By Peter D. Kramer, Scribner: 316 pp., $25

“Spectacular Happiness,” the first novel from Peter D. Kramer, the best-selling psychiatrist of “Listening to Prozac,” unfolds like a case study, albeit one with substantial twists: Rather than being told by an analyst straining for objectivity, it is narrated by the subject himself in the form of a memoir to his son. The subject is Chip Samuels, a product of two forces that provoke internal war: the radical ‘60s and the affluent, rapidly developing Cape Cod town of Sesuit. Chip, whose father was a carpenter, has chosen to live, on one hand, like stranded gentry and, on the other, like an anti-materialistic, forever-adolescent hippie. He lives in the tiny cottage his father built, teaches at the community college and stubbornly refuses the call of aspiration. It’s enough to make his wife--once a devoted radical too--hit the road with their son, leaving Chip to drift out of his passivity and into a bombing spree that methodically levels vacation homes along Sesuit’s beachfront. “I have found literature a reliable companion,” Chip says, furiously engaged and alarmingly detached and coming across more like a bookish Thoreau (who’s often cited here, along with Sartre, Marx and, weirdly, John Galsworthy) than the Unabomber. (Actually, Chip most resembles Benjamin Sacks in Paul Auster’s “Leviathan,” which also makes a cameo.) Kramer has a knack for provoking with refreshingly unembarrassed--and often explosive--intellect.