FIRST FICTION

SASSO

By James Sturz

Walker & Co.: 312 pp., $24.95

“So what am I doing in this funky spelunky southern Italian town anyway, lodged like a pebble in the instep of the Italian boot?” The “funky spelunky” town in question is cave-pocked Mancanzano, and the narrator of this literate thriller is a nameless young cultural anthropologist from New York who finds himself attached to a yearlong dig exploring this fictional town’s grottoes.

The team, a ragtag crew of eccentrics from America, Britain and Holland, is working to locate and preserve the endangered frescoes painted onto the caves’ delicate interiors: The entire town, it turns out, is built upon soft, crumbly tufa, a chalky substance thought to have salutary powers. Some of the locals even grate it, like Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, over their pasta.

But as the team continues its work, it begins to stumble upon the nude corpses of teenage lovers, their mouths mysteriously full of tufa. What ensues is the often hilarious investigation of an ever-widening epidemic of apparent death by coitus, as James Sturz unearths the unlikely habits of a town where “houses fold into each other like a distended urban origami.” Sturz has a flair for nifty turns of phrase, and this farcical whodunit is loaded, like Mancanzano itself, with pockets to get delightfully lost in: there are tangents about everything from art history and geology to sex and Italian politics. If “Sasso” (the word means “stone” in Italian) threatens to crumble into a hodgepodge, it only better serves its theme of the porousness of reality: “Truth,” as the narrator eventually discovers, “is opacities, ambiguities, and spaces of darkness and blinding sun.”

*

THE ART OF SEEING

By Cammie McGovern

Scribner: 286 pp., $24

Cammie McGovern’s first novel is an inventive meditation on the plight of the younger sister, “born with an eye not on the horizon, but on the hem of a shirt just ahead, the flash of a ponytail whipping side to side.” For Jemma Phillips, that shirt and ponytail belong to big sister Rozzie, a headstrong high-school actress who lands a role in a Hollywood movie.

“The Art of Seeing” takes a magnifying glass to sisterly roles and perceptions distorted by fame. There’s Rozzie, toiling on movie sets and winding up in the gossip pages; her world is enveloping, but leaves her unprotected. As for Jemma, she’s often called in to keep Rozzie sane, a subsidiary role that Jemma accepts with only vague queasiness.

Compared to the high-flying Rozzie, Jemma is a typically earthbound teen. Collegiate pastimes come awkwardly: “I don’t know how to pump a keg smoothly or get stoned without coughing,” she tells us. But Jemma is an acute observer of her surroundings, and she decides to become a photographer, choosing the more anonymous trajectory of art.

When Rozzie begins to lose her eyesight, this tortoise-and-hare story becomes deliciously complicated. Rozzie’s blindness provides Jemma with stirring photographic subject matter and stunning opportunities for betrayal. It also allows McGovern to explore the deep shadows thrown by sisterly rivalry: “I’ve lived for the electric thrill of her attention,” Jemma admits, “the spotlight feel of her eyes on me alone.” In the “The Art of Seeing,” McGovern skillfully reflects the spotlight of fame back on itself.

*

TEMPTING FAITH DiNAPOLI

By Lisa Gabriele

Simon & Schuster: 224 pp., $24

Halfway through this novel, which has the intimacy of a memoir, Faith DiNapoli takes up the time-honored teen habit of shoplifting. She’s in the midst of that awkward phase of being alternately fascinated and grossed out by boys, puffing the occasional cigarette, and recognizing how weird her family is. When she’s finally busted for stealing, Faith, our companionable coming-of-age narrator, feels she’s become “the center of attention in a family that had no center, or ability to pay attention.” Lisa Gabriele gives us a family portrait that’s as affectionate as it is rueful: For the DiNapolis of suburban Detroit (they live on the Canadian side), the center disintegrates when father Joe, a meek Italian immigrant, takes a construction gig in faraway Calgary. Not that Faith’s mother, the hard-nosed Nancy, really cares. As Faith’s kleptomania expands to include stealing glances at her mom’s diary, she learns that her parents’ marriage is essentially over, that her mother lusts after a neighbor boy, and that she’s obsessed with money.

It’s no surprise--the DiNapolis are barely getting by, and Gabriele shows us just how rough it is for a single mom, even one as cold-blooded as Nancy, to make it with four kids and a restaurant job.

With its eye on Foreigner concerts and an ear for hilarious slang, “Tempting Faith DiNapoli” charmingly evokes the pubescent folkways of the early ‘80s. But this diverting novel is not so much an exercise in sociology as an unabashed celebration of growing up, even if you’re poor, Catholic and Canadian.