FIRST FICTION

DIARY OF A MANHATTAN CALL GIRL, by Tracy Quan, Crown: 274 pp., $22

Tracy Quan’s semiautobiographical debut novel--its subject is clear from the title--wastes no time, opening on a menage that’s as acrobatic as it is hilarious. If it’s Quan’s intention to shock, she succeeds royally. But her success lies not so much in the hard-focus sex as in the fact that this year in the life of a modern-day Upper East Side courtesan is so unexpectedly wise, observant and--best of all--fun. Quan’s call-girl narrator, the exotic, “Oriental” Nancy Chan, is one of “Manhattan’s therapized elite”; she also admits that, “since the age of ten, I’d wanted to be a hooker.” The demimonde that Quan gives us is frank, unapologetic and sunny, even as her well-heeled clients, sundry girlfriends and madams, forbearing voyeuristic shrink and sweet, clueless fiance begin to swirl around her in increasingly uncomfortable formations, leaving us to wonder if gimlet-eyed Nancy--now a seasoned pro in her 30s--really knows herself so well after all: “Once you’ve got a nice apartment, some decent clients, and enough time for a personal life, things get horribly complicated.” The beauty of Quan’s “diary”--she was once a sex worker herself and many of these episodes appeared in her column for Salon.com--is that its hopes and fears, of commitment and career, apply to everybody. It’s also a nifty lens on Manhattan, which appears here as a colorful ballroom for the strange dance of power between needful Wall Street players and their secret and, in the case of Nancy, equally enterprising paramours.

BEAR V. SHARK, by Chris Bachelder, Scribner: 256 pp., $22

As our eyes adjust to the lurid, ultra-suburban scenery of Chris Bachelder’s bedazzling and bewildering debut novel, we’re tempted to ask if people really live in shag-carpeted realms pondering such weighty issues as “Was Grizzly Adams the name of the bearded guy or the bear?” The question is a turn on New Yorker editor Harold Ross’ famous query on whether Moby-Dick was the man or the whale, and it’s also a subtle signal--against a not-so-subtle backdrop--that Bachelder is up to something playfully referential, ostentatiously smart and totally unconcerned about verisimilitude. In the way that cool young Hollywood actors like to play Middle American losers because they get to wear the latest in vintage-shop eyewear and leather, Bachelder proposes a garishly stylish fantasia built up from late-night drywall infomercials and pop-culture effluvia, all centering on an event that, in terms of scale, popularity and exploitation, is part World Wrestling Federation and part presidential election: It’s Bear versus Shark, a staged battle-to-the-death, a national obsession for a nation obsessed with being obsessed. Recent polls, by the way, show that 52% of Americans think the shark has the edge, and the Norman family is loading up the SUV to drive to the newly emerged nation of Las Vegas to catch the rematch. Along the way, Bachelder’s story--such as it is--emerges in surreal sound bites, making the experience of reading “Bear v. Shark” as jarring and addictive as cruising through a hundred channels of cable with the remote on autopilot.

RED HOOK, by Gabriel Cohen, St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne: 294 pp., $23.95

Red Hook is a Brooklyn neighborhood that juts out provocatively into New York’s vast harbor. Its teeming docks were once the terminus of the Erie Canal and the turf where Al Capone got his criminal start. In Gabriel Cohen’s sophisticated contemporary noir, Red Hook is a place with a storied past, a shaky present and a tantalizing chance at rebirth. The same could be said of Jack Leightner, the middle-aged Brooklyn homicide detective at the heart of this top-shelf crime novel. Leightner grew up in the notorious Red Hook Houses, an immense public housing project, but he isn’t keen to return to the Hook’s cobbled streets and decaying warehouses. In fact, when he’s assigned a murder case in which a young Hispanic man is found in the brackish, fluorescently polluted Gowanus Canal, Leightner--not easily given to queasiness--becomes both skittish at the direction of the investigation (straight to Red Hook) and dangerously obsessed with cracking what looks like an unsolvable case. What Cohen does so well here is to give us everything we require from a cop story--the beleaguered gumshoe, the divorced wife, the concerned partner, the generation gapped son, the villain who turns out to be a well-off slummer--and then so much more: There’s a documentary panache to his depiction of Brooklyn and its history (appropriate, because Leightner’s slacker son is an aspiring filmmaker) and an acutely rendered sense of consequence, of the way criminal acts--and personal histories--radiate to effect entire communities.