FIRST FICTION

CRANBERRY QUEEN By Kathleen DeMarco Talk Miramax: 258 pp., $21.95

The New Jersey Pine Barrens: home to cranberry bogs and dwarf pines; celebrated in New Yorker prose by John McPhee; playground of the fiendish Jersey Devil, the East Coast’s Sasquatch; a mellow, beautiful, sparsely inhabited wasteland in the heart of the strip-mall and petrochemical capital of the known universe. It’s into this barren, alien territory that Diana Moore, a New York Internet professional, brings her barren, alien self: “I am anyone, anyone at all, but me, Diana Moore, brown of hair, nine of shoe, and wide of thigh,” she says, and this is even before she’s stripped down to her very roots by the deaths of her mother, father and only brother in a horrible auto accident. Kathleen DeMarco, who happens to come from good Pine Barren stock, places Diana into this territory without landmarks and lets her try to navigate to a semblance of civilization, of recovery, of self. If it all sounds desperately serious, it’s not, probably because DeMarco--a veteran producer and screenwriter--has a natural levity that makes this essentially harmless story about life’s cruelties seem like an ideal beach read, the literary equivalent of a first-date flick. It’s full of endearingly eccentric locals, conflicts that play out according to the screenplay handbook and tragedies that come as nicely packaged as a box of Raisinets, but it keeps you planted in your seat until the credits roll.

AMERICAN SONBy Brian Ascalon Roley W. W. Norton: 218 pp., $13 paper

At first glance, this story of two half-Filipino brothers growing up in south Santa Monica looks like a neon-lit allegory: The older brother, Tomas, who dresses like a Mexican gangster and tools around in a provocatively painted Oldsmobile, sells fancy dogs to Brentwood types. Sometimes the dogs come from the hood--chained-up pit bulls, hopeless cases of dubious breeding and limited prospects--but, more preferably, they are American bulldogs, bred by Tomas himself on his prized bitch, Buster.

Gabe, Tomas’ younger, timid and easily manipulated brother, narrates this story and looks upon his brother’s petty criminality with a mixture of fear, bewilderment and acquiescence. It’s the immigrant experience spelled out in Alpo: Los Angeles is a dog-eat-dog kind of town; immigrant enclaves are teeming kennels, and only a few choice specimens will be plucked out of this inhumane environment to flourish elsewhere. It’s actually a pretty nifty metaphor, but Brian Ascalon Roley has more up his sleeve, filling in these bold outlines with some subtle shades: The triangle of Gabe, Tomas and their shy, helpless Filipina mother (their American dad is long gone) creates a multihued prism for looking at issues of parenting and heritage, aspiration and assimilation, birth order and rivalry, pride and embarrassment. And just when we think we’ll find out if Gabe and Tomas can break out of their straitened circumstances, Roley brings his compelling narrative to a close, leaving us to wonder which fate will ultimately end up adopting these mismatched brothers.

LOVERBOY By Victoria Redel Graywolf Press: 216 pp., $21.95

Victoria Redel’s novel isn’t a fictionalized tribute to the legendary Canadian hair band, and its Eros is far creepier than the airbrushed MTV stuff that even literary fiction seems to flirt with these days: “I tilted his head to keep the shampoo from running into his eyes. I munched on his thick legs. I chewed on his buttocks. I kissed his lips. I let him suck the dried sticky jam off my finger.” The recipient of this deluxe attention is Loverboy himself: not the gardener, not the milkman, not the destined-to-perish-in-Vietnam boyfriend, but rather the child of a flamboyantly self-obsessed woman who narrates in chapters that fade in and out like waking dreams. We never really register her name, and we discover only at the conclusion of this odd tale why she’s lying in a hospital, comatose. And we never quite understand the reasons for her dangerously overwrought mother love, even as she gives us glimpses of her normal yet indifferent parents; of the juggernaut of copulation--she prefers mating to courtship--that leads to the conception of Loverboy (“many men equals no father,” she explains); of her attraction to the sweaty teenager who mows her grass; and of the stream of pet names she coins for her baby (actual name, Paul) who grows up to chafe violently against the monstrous umbilicus that ties him to his weirdo mother. It’s as if Redel is saying that obsession has its own unknowable logic and we can limn only the details, not the reasons; the result is this earnest little Gothic horror that will have the local PTA up in arms.