FIRST FICTION

PASSING STRANGE

By Sally MacLeod

Random House: 310 pp., $23.95

Pungently erotic, searingly violent and ultimately tragic, Sally MacLeod’s ambitious first novel is a high-wire act, and she writes with such devil-may-care abandon that you get the sense that she has no need for a safety net. “Passing Strange” is a novel about plastic surgery, infidelity, the New South, class resentment and interracial sex. It’s part “Madame Bovary” and part bus-station novel. And its heroine, Claudia, is a melancholic soul who’s as recklessly willful as she is disturbingly passive. Born to a white working-class Vermont family and painfully ugly, Claudia somehow snags a well-born New York WASP husband, a lovable frat-boy jackass. When the unlikely couple decide to move to North Carolina, he arranges radical surgery for Claudia, and she is transformed, at least on the outside, into a beauty: “this unearned esteem would weigh on me, and paw at me like the hand of a beggar.” Once in North Carolina, the new Claudia is stunned by the local black population, by “rear ends like Lycra-coated melons.” When she starts meeting Calvin, the black yardman, for illicit encounters in an abandoned farmhouse, she is “perfected,” and all hell breaks loose.

With its sexual obsessions, “Passing Strange” dares us to call it racist, but each page is full of brave truths about everything from love, desire and family to strip malls, country clubbers and even--when this daring novel heads for home--the death penalty.

*

THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY

By Haven Kimmel

Doubleday: 240 pp., $23.95

“They were curious about nothing, they exhibited no restlessness, they seemed to want nothing more than they had.” This is the Rev. Amos Townsend reflecting on the mild-mannered Midwesterners who attend his Lost Creek Church of the Brethren in rural Haddington, Ind. For grad-school dropout Langston Braverman, the daughter of one of Amos’ parishioners, Haddington is similarly alarming. “Some days she was able to ignore the aesthetic travesty of her hometown; sometimes she felt it acutely.” “The Solace of Leaving Early” is a kind of contemporary “Winesburg, Ohio” as seen through the gimlet eyes of two seemingly opposite outsiders: There’s Amos, toiling at his awkward sermons, obsessing over theologian Paul Tillich and patiently counseling the unhappily wed of Haddington. And then there’s Langston, condescending, militantly feminist and supposedly writing a postmodern novel in the attic of the aluminum-sided house she grew up in. Yet both share a fondness for Kierkegaard and John Donne, and both are intensely caught up in the nuances of Christianity.

Telling this story in alternating chapters that give us the overlapping viewpoints of Amos and Langston, Haven Kimmel puts these frustrated small-town intellectuals on a collision course as they vie for influence over two orphaned sisters who call themselves Immaculata and Epiphany. With Amos and Langston racing toward either hatred or true love, Kimmel gives us a stunning bird’s-eye view of rural American life, as damning as it is affectionate: Haddington may have its gun-toters and religious kooks, but for at least some of the locals, Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound are as cherished as the Farmer’s Almanac.

*

HIMALAYAN DHABA

By Craig Joseph Danner

Dutton: 288 pp., $23.95

Craig Joseph Danner, the author of this novel about an American doctor’s tenure in a snowy Himalayan outpost, has a knack for food imagery. At various points, the sky over the remote village where Mary has come to heal (or, at least, not harm) resembles chicken broth, salad greens and, when ravens circle, pepper on scrambled eggs. There are frequent mentions of meals being shuttled from a tiny cafe--the dhaba of the title--by Amod, a shy waiter with a lazy eye and a crush on Mary. If the many invocations of food highlight the centrality of the dhaba for the assorted townsfolk and interlopers who wander through this engaging tale, Danner also makes sure to avoid making us hopelessly hungry: For all of “Himalayan Dhaba’s” rich exotica, there’s more realism than magic here, and the overriding tone is one of lean anxiety rather than feast-like sensuality. Mary, it turns out, has journeyed here because her late husband once volunteered his medical services in the village hospital. But Mary soon discovers she has little time--amid breech babies and ruptured appendixes--to ruminate over her loss: She’s surrounded by cultural miscommunication and by a weird plot by the town drug dealer to kidnap a well-to-do British backpacker.

Danner, himself once a doctor in the Himalayas, is a convincing guide in the operating room and throughout this odd village, with its Western stoners, bemused locals and an earnest young woman testing the limits of her grit.