FIRST FICTION

GOD’S FOOL, By Mark Slouka, Alfred A. Knopf: 270 pp., $24

Darin Strauss’ 2000 novel “Chang and Eng” presented the surprisingly affecting story of the famous Siamese twins who settled in North Carolina--raising families and holding slaves--in the decades preceding the Civil War. It’s impossible not to think of Strauss’ book while reading Mark Slouka’s “God’s Fool,” a new effort to fictionalize the hopelessly entwined lives of these bygone sideshow superstars.

If “Chang and Eng,” narrated by the uptight, God-fearing Eng, offered one side of the brothers’ dual history, then “God’s Fool,” narrated by the erratic, drink-loving Chang, offers, at last, the other. Though Strauss’ Eng was conscientious about facts and dates, Slouka’s Chang is enraptured by the fleeting moments that threaten to become lost to memory.

He isn’t fixated on the ligature that ties him to his brother or with the freaky details of show business or with the 21 kids they managed to sire. Instead, Slouka zeroes in on the unlikely friendship between Chang’s son Christopher and a slave, the still-flickering ember of a love lost years ago in Paris and the quiet minutes before the Confederates launched Pickett’s Charge. (Christopher may have been a participant.)

In the end, we realize that Slouka’s eccentric telling of Chang’s life has eluded all of our sordid questions and has miraculously elevated us above being mere gawkers.

*

POINT FURY, By John Maxwell, Scribner: 320 pp., $24

May God have mercy on aging rock guitarists, for John Maxwell, in his debut thriller, will have none. The guitar-slinger in question is Chris Nielson, a well-meaning dude from Boston who has spent most of his adult life racking up near-misses: His grunge-metal band, X Bomb, had a minor radio hit but, naturally, got hosed by the record industry; his longtime relationship with Cassie ended up going nowhere, stuck in the Sargasso of late 20s indecision.

Maxwell catches up with Chris as he agrees to mansion-sit for Ted Harper, his dad’s Yale buddy, during the off-season on an isolated spit of land near Ocean City, Md. It’s here that Chris has come to get his head together, but where, as he eventually discovers, his menacing employer has vowed to “take you out of your little imaginary world and bring you into the real one.”

But the world that Ted--a vivid capitalist-tool psycho--constructs for Chris is far from real: Chris’ first inkling that Ted is nuts comes when he discovers that the mysterious girl he’s had a fling with is, in fact, an actress sent by Ted. When Chris unwisely retaliates, “Point Fury” unleashes itself like a power-chord rampage, and Chris is sucked into a game of revenge in which he’s hopelessly overmatched. Bracingly atmospheric and gleefully sadistic to its wishy-washy protagonist, Maxwell’s debut lays bare the paranoia underlying slackerdom.

*

CONFESSING A MURDER, By Nicholas Drayson, W.W. Norton: 282 pp., $23.95

“Confessing a murder” was a phrase used by Charles Darwin to describe his misgivings on unveiling the theory of evolution. Darwin’s hesitation--and the unlikely provenance of his brilliant theory--are at the heart of Australian naturalist Nicholas Drayson’s entertaining first novel, which takes the form of a message in a bottle.

The bottle (actually a glass jar “bound around with a layer of soft bark from the Pisonia tree to keep it safe from hard blows, and tied with the tendrils of the floating water-lily”) was jettisoned by a nameless naturalist--a childhood friend of Darwin’s--searching for golden scarab beetles while stranded on a remote Pacific island obliterated by a volcano in the 1880s.

While this erudite, doomed castaway catalogs the island’s Galapagos-esque profusion of life--dildoe trees, land cucumbers and cocoa-nut crabs--he tells us about growing up as a gay orphan in the rarefied world of Darwin’s family, pointing Darwin toward natural selection (an idea that the religious Darwin balked at) and harboring a lifelong infatuation with an undeserving rogue named Charley, who accompanies him on his golden scarab quest.

As his descriptions of the island’s life forms--and their outre mating habits--accumulate, we realize that our stranded narrator is working up to confessing an altogether different kind of murder. The postmodern conceit of the found manuscript is worn around the edges, but Drayson infuses it with engagingly fusty prose and with a hero who just might be a snake in the grass of his atoll Eden.