FIRST FICTION

A THING OR TWO ABOUT CURTIS AND CAMILLA

By Nick Fowler

Pantheon: 398 pp., $24.95

The first half of Nick Fowler’s ambitious, irresistibly melodic debut novel about love in lower Manhattan resonates like a perfect pop song: You just want to revisit it over and over again. Fowler, a former musician, knows how to set up an unforgettable hook and then drum it, like Bun E. Carlos, into our heads. And his writing is studded with the kind of casually cosmic insights that parallel universe rock stars might offer to Rolling Stone: “We know we’re grown-ups when we stop resisting the urge to become a cliche.” “We think abstraction is a detour, but maybe it’s our saving grace.”

This is how Curtis, Fowler’s down-and-out songwriter narrator, talks. And in Curtis’ story of “gooey love,” which begins when he runs into the model-esque Camilla and her little dachshund on Houston Street, even gray New York is magically transformed: “Manhattan had removed that stick of straw from its teeth and [was] now blowing her pheromones into the wind like the fluffy spokes of a dandelion.” The energy is infectious as Curtis and Camilla blossom together. Of course, it all goes to hell, and when it does, this remarkable book launches into its B side: the wacky ballad of Curtis, post-Camilla, complete with Rogaine jokes, animal rights vigilantes and an over-the-top Indian quack doctor. It’s funny stuff, but the melodies are strained, as if Fowler had somehow become as desperate as his heartbroken hero. But the A side--an invigorating blast of originality, wit and heart--is a smash.

*

NARCISSUS ASCENDING

By Karen McKinnon

Picador USA: 212 pp., $21

Karen McKinnon’s curious debut novel was inspired by Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism,” the celebrated book that wrung its hands over Americans’ tendencies toward self-obsession. It’s not surprising, then, that “Narcissus Ascending” comes across as a mildly fanciful case study, its bite-sized sentences roaming with terse authority over a group of overstimulated friends on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

And what a grim cast they are, incessantly rehashing their days at Berkeley, making appointments with their herbalists and, most of all, nurturing their gossipy obsession with Callie, the beautiful ex-friend who has betrayed each of them. If the manipulative, crisis-prone Callie is the book’s Narcissus, then Becky, the artist who makes awful-sounding photo collages, is its ascending: As she prepares her first big gallery show and assents to a plan to wreak payback upon Callie, Becky threatens to turn into Callie II: the new focus of the group’s awe, anxiety and envy. And when Becky’s and Callie’s roles become scrambled--and their images entwine in one of Becky’s works--we actually begin to feel sorry for the dreaded Callie. It’s this moment--when Callie’s hold upon her friends extends to the reader--that “Narcissus Ascending” leaps beyond its own self-reflective, front-loaded obsessions. Otherwise, one wishes McKinnon would have held up a cosmetic mirror to the clipped prose that makes this promising story little more than a psychoanalytic soap opera.

*

LOSING GEMMA

By Katy Gardner

Riverhead: 312 pp., $13 paper

“Backpackers who treated the world as a vast global playground, laid on for their personal thrills and adventure, ran the risk of being violently disabused.” This is Esther, recalling the fateful backpacking journey through India that she and her best friend, Gemma, took in 1989.

In Katy Gardner’s devourable first novel, a kind of a subcontinental “The Comfort of Strangers,” these twentysomething English women learn this bitter lesson in ways that constantly surprise the reader and themselves. In fact, it becomes downright deadly, as Gemma falls deliriously ill in a remote Indian outpost, refuses Esther’s attempts to remove her to a safer place and decides to throw her lot in with Coral, a creepy Australian backpacker and possible cult member. Stung by this betrayal, Esther leaves her best friend in Coral’s care, only to return in a panic to find what looks like Gemma’s charred body in the overgrown thickets surrounding the ruins of an ancient temple.

“Losing Gemma” isn’t so much about potentially hazardous strangers as it is about the promises and perils of friendship. What Gardner offers here, amid the exotic scenery and disintegrating sense of middle-class entitlement, is a convincing travelogue of the heart, in which two lifelong friends evolve against a strange backdrop, and one of them--it becomes increasingly unclear which--is left behind.