FIRST FICTION

Dipping into this story cycle about small-town life in the not-so-Deep South is like pulling a half-forgotten book off the shelf of the local library. The tone and pace of Christine Lincoln’s accomplished debut have the ring of great American mid-century writing, before anybody thought of stuff like postmodernism or minimalism. The effect is of plainly chosen words that continually pool into something sensuous, surprising and a shade magical.

As Lincoln pokes around the nooks and crannies of Grandville, Md., we can almost hear the crickets sing and feel the humidity in the air: “ ... Grandville, where time was measured by how long it took the sun to sink to the bottom of the sky, and distance by the steps it took to get to someone’s yard.”

But Lincoln isn’t interested in the experience of place so much as the experience of narrative and what it means in our lives. The African American families who pass through her pages spend their days caught up in story lines--reflecting on the nature of stories, sifting through them and passing them on to those who would listen.

In “Bug Juice,” a young boy learns the miraculous news that blacks can and, in fact, do write books. “A Hook Will Sometimes Keep You” tells of a girl taught by her aunt that the tree she loves to climb has a connection back to slave times and the legends that emerged from them. “Acorn Pipes” reveals that storytelling in the form of gossip picks up momentum when the subject is a dead person. And, in “Last Will,” the legacy left by a grandmother turns out to be an unpublished--and wholly unsuspected--short story.

Throughout these stories about stories, with their quiet aura of unapologetic modernism, Lincoln takes the measure of Grandville’s daily life gesture by gesture, brightening the corners where youth turns into adulthood, faithfulness into adultery, stories into truth.

THE ASH GARDEN, By Dennis Bock, Alfred A. Knopf: 284 pp., $23

Dennis Bock’s searching, ambitious first novel tells the intertwining stories of two people from opposite sides of the world who have spent their lives learning to live with the bomb. Opening with a dreamlike sequence in which Emiko Amai recalls the long-ago afternoon of Aug. 6, 1945, when, as a 6-year-old girl she played with her brother near Hiroshima’s Bantai Bridge, “The Ash Garden” quickly hardens into a crystalline meditation on the defining event of the 20th century and its aftermath. That it never lapses into lazy abstraction is a testament to Bock’s hard work and painstaking attention to historical and psychological detail. If some of that effort seems to cling ostentatiously to this solid and consistently challenging novel, Bock, to his credit, never appears to be in over his head.

The same could be said of Anton Boll, Emiko’s formidable counterpart and foil. A German intellectual and nuclear physicist who fled Germany at the start of the war, Boll has maintained an unshakable faith in his decisions--in his positivistic claims to right and wrong--to keep him above the messy fray of mea culpa.

If you haven’t guessed, Boll was part of the team that designed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the bombs that forever changed Emiko’s fate, killing her brother and leaving her disfigured. While Boll has devoted his life to an overcompensating effort to remind the public of the atom bomb’s necessity, Emiko has campaigned as a living monument to the bomb’s terrible, evil power, and to the moral quandary it has left upon the world like an unhealing scar. When the two of them cross paths in 1995 at a 50th-anniversary Hiroshima remembrance in New York, they’re improbably drawn together, their differences and similarities brought into vivid relief.

Emiko, now a documentary filmmaker, requests to interview Boll, whose continuing faith in the bomb is guided, in part, by the horrors his wife endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Boll warily accepts the invitation, and a tenuous detente--based on Emiko and Boll’s weird mutual need--is hammered out, full of recrimination, guilt and, eventually, the creepy revelation that Boll’s influence on Emiko’s life extends far beyond nuclear physics.

As Emiko tells Boll, “[i]t is a history that will always fascinate me. It’s my subject, and I can never imagine another as important or as definitive of who we are.” It’s Boll’s subject too, and you get the wonderfully strange feeling, reading “The Ash Garden,” of two people zealously guarding their claim to this otherwise unwanted real estate.

Bock has--in his impressive debut--found an inventive way of making the time-worn case that the uncomfortably intimate subject of nuclear annihilation isn’t just Emiko’s or Boll’s--it belongs to all of us.