FIRST FICTION

BAROQUE-A-NOVA

By Kevin Chong

Putnam: 240 pp., $23.95

Like an accomplished songwriter, Kevin Chong can sum up adolescence in a few deft strokes: “I was eighteen, slack-jawed and gangly in army-surplus apparel, with narrow, miserly eyes and greasy hair falling in them, heavy and frizzy like wet yarn.” The adolescent in question is Canadian high schooler Saul St. Pierre, and he’s a vividly drawn, unsparing narrator who is like thousands of other misfit kids strewn across North America, with one exception: His parents, Ian and Helena St. Pierre, were folk-rock superstars--a la Ian and Sylvia--back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.

“Baroque-a-Nova” tells the story of the fallout from that long-ago era of mellowness: Saul has had to cope with the burden of his parents’ celebrity and the corresponding burden of not benefiting at all from it, with his father’s philandering, and, most significant, with the disappearance--and suicide--of his cult-figure mother. Helena St. Pierre is a mysterious larger-than-life chanteuse, made all the more romantic by her absence. She is the beguiling heart of this tough-minded ballad about the travails of a pop-culture family. Chong perfectly orchestrates the notion that Helena’s absence from Saul’s life is as omnipresent as the new sample-heavy remake of the St. Pierres’ “Bushmills Threnody” that’s currently clogging the airwaves. With its strains of family, suburbia and awakening sexuality, Chong’s impressive--and often hilarious--debut cleverly suggests that, in our disposable culture, being a flash-in-the-pan--like the St. Pierres--can inconveniently last forever.

*

GONE

By Martin Roper

Henry Holt: 228 pp., $23

When Stephen, the emotionally besieged narrator of Martin Roper’s first novel, and Ursula, his wife, move into a fixer-upper Dublin townhouse, the romance of domesticity is swiftly blown out of the water: For some reason, the local urchins have taken a disliking to the striving young couple and, through a campaign of rock throwing, petty vandalism and verbal intimidation, turn Stephen and Ursula’s dream house into a nightmare and their marriage into a shambles. Roper has a flair for zeroing in on the disquietude that so often surrounds or underlies relationships, both erotic and familial, and Stephen, as he meanders from Dublin to New York to the ultra-American cornfields of Iowa, has his fair share of inner turmoil: His sister Ruth dies of cancer as the book opens; he and Ursula call it quits when he flees to New York; his erotic entanglement with Holfy, a pretentious New York photographer, can’t seem to find a path between sadomasochism and love; and his mother has slipped away into a mysterious new life in Cardiff. Despite all the grimness (the amount of melancholy packed into this little book could be calculated by the square millimeter), Roper imbues Stephen’s wanderings with austere beauty and such koan-like insights as “Depression is beautiful music that does nothing to the emotions.” For the most part, Roper has an impressive handle on his shifting locales--those places where his forever-leaving and forever-arriving narrator is plagued by all who have gone, including himself.

*

SEARCHING FOR INTRUDERS

By Stephen Raleigh Byler

Morrow: 244 pp., $23.95

A novel in stories is the aardvark of fiction. It’s a literary oddball, sometimes hard to pull off, but in his debut, Stephen Raleigh Byler rises to the challenge. “Searching for Intruders” is the episodic history of a guy named Wilson Hues, told in chapters that fade in and out, their chronology as loose as their structure is tight. If each story stands on its own, together they advance with novelistic momentum, even if the rootless Wilson--a decent young man from the Pennsylvania Amish country with a mild case of wanderlust--mostly spins his wheels.

When the book opens, we find Wilson and his soon-to-be ex-wife plagued by cockroaches in a cramped New York apartment. These Kafkaesque house guests and Wilson’s efforts to eradicate them become multi-purpose metaphors that ring throughout the book, vividly embodying the teeming doubts that come out to feast in the wee hours and the need to pitch quixotic battles. But even when Byler weaves Wilson’s father’s death, his new lover’s losing battle with cancer and a brutal murder into the story line, “Searching for Intruders” never gets mired in melodrama.

The stoic Byler has so much Pennsylvania German good sense that he is unfazed by the catastrophes he so ably chronicles. It’s an affecting disconnect, thoroughly in keeping with Wilson, who, after all he endures, finally comes to a belated epiphany after befriending a pathetic stray dog while on a trip to Chile. Upon receiving a lecture on the connection between cruelty and maturity by one of the locals, Wilson, ever on the verge of growing up, defiantly declares, “then I will never be a man.”