FIRST FICTION

DON’T MEAN NOTHING : Short Stories of Vietnam

By Susan O’Neill

Ballantine: 252 pp., $22

A lieutenant attempts to feed “genuine Chef Boy-ar-dee pizza” to the apparition of an old Vietnamese man squatting in a cemetery; a flatulent pet monkey initiates a series of candy-bar thefts, spreads lice and inspires bloodlust in an otherwise peace-loving nurse at Chu Lai hospital; a jones-ing 18-year-old soldier--”Out of hash. Out of coke. And out of money until Tuesday”--accidentally gasses himself to death on anesthesia; and an after-hours romp in a hospital chapel draws two lovers into a roving discussion about sex, God, Vietnam and altar boys. Subtitled “Short Stories of Vietnam,” Susan O’Neill’s debut offers startling glimpses of absurdity and transcendence at three Vietnam field hospitals where, against a backdrop of blood and testosterone, young female officers and nurses are made simultaneously into saviors, survivors and sex objects.

The episodes recorded here have eyewitness immediacy, and, in her elucidating introduction, O’Neill describes her own hitch in Vietnam and her long history, as a writer, of coming to grips with it. Noting that “don’t mean nothing” was a popular catch phrase in Vietnam’s combat hospitals, O’Neill offers a damning, if conundrum-like, update: “I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn’t Mean Nothing.” Yet, like her predecessors Tim O’Brien, Thom Jones and Beverly Gologorsky, O’Neill manages to salvage powerful new meanings from the terrible nothingness, making this collection, with its “Leaving on a Jet Plane” soundtrack and cast of eccentrics, as entertaining as it is harrowing.

*

THE LAKE OF DEAD LANGUAGES

By Carol Goodman

Ballantine Books: 368 pp., $23.95

Triangulations abound in Carol Goodman’s deeply atmospheric first novel, set at the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks. There’s a trio of present-day Goth chicks studying Latin under teacher Jane Hudson, who, likewise, was part of a formidable trio of Heart Lake girls 20 years earlier. From the lake that borders the school, whose unknowable depths provide much of the book’s portentous aura, jut three sister-like rocks. And when Goodman delves deeper, into the circumstances of the Heart Lake generation before Jane, we find a three-tiered story emerging about young women who seem forever destined to repeat hushed-up outlandish behaviors: attempted (or faked) suicides, baby swappings, possible murders and mysterious drownings.

The deepest mystery of all is why Jane would return to her creepy alma mater, a place where her roommates Lucy and Deirdre--both, like Jane, overstimulated by their Latin studies--were tragically swallowed up by the lake in circumstances that only get weirder the more Goodman reveals. These revelations, too, come in threes: There’s the accepted version, there’s the discovery of what really happened and then there’s the final improbable twist designed to take our breath away. With so much to reveal, and so many ways to reveal it “The Lake of Dead Languages” threatens to become a drowning pool for all but the most robustly patient reader. And if this hybrid of “The Virgin Suicides” and “The Secret History” ultimately ends up resembling an upscale “Scream,” Goodman does float us a few life buoys: a wonderfully eerie sense of place, deft jabs at prep school politics and, a rare thing, a cast of characters who know their datives from their ablatives.

*

GLOW IN THE DARK

By Lisa Teasley

Cune Press: 192 pp., $23.95

This slim story collection from Lisa Teasley is a pocket-sized gazetteer that ranges from Manhattan’s East Village to Santa Monica, from Jersey City to Paris, from Big Sur down to Baja. Along the way, we encounter people with names like Boogie, Zen and Jazz--marginal types who tend to smoke hash, have pink hair, sport ankh tattoos and have impeccable noses for trouble. Despite the far-flung geography and a pervasive aura of emotional wanderlust, Teasley’s down-and-outers--many of them of mixed ethnicity--never really get very far. The title character in “Nepenthe,” ends up back in the Big Sur restaurant where she was allegedly conceived in the restroom. Marty, in “Baker,” is doing well at AA yet has a darker addiction that’s too incriminating for him to seek outside help. And Zasu, in “Holiday Confessional,” flees a brutal Brooklyn crime scene only to spill the beans to two hipsters in a popular cocktail bar across the river. It would seem that times are bleak indeed for the contemporary multicultural bohemian.

But if this gritty tableaux isn’t always satisfyingly fleshed out, and if they seem almost to strain for edginess, Teasley’s prose often saves the day: It brims over with plain-spoken energy, gutsy observations and neo-beatnik flair.