10TH GRADEBy Joseph WeisbergRandom House: 260 pp.,...

10TH GRADE

By Joseph Weisberg

Random House: 260 pp., $23.95

“I’m not writing this for class anyway I’m just writing it. I’ll just give myself an A on it.” So writes high-school sophomore Jeremy Reskin of the fascinating document he calls “10th Grade,” a largely punctuation-free “creative writing” exercise that chronicles his suburban sentimental education during the era of alligator shirts and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” “10th Grade” is also the title of this artful, devourable first novel from Joseph Weisberg, which re-creates high school with terrifying accuracy as Jeremy gropes his way toward a semblance of self-hood and a barely passing grade in math. Jeremy’s an odd duck: He plays soccer, but doesn’t share the “Jock State of Mind”; he hangs out with a group of trendy misfits, but he doesn’t wear black or engage in their endless food-court philosophizing. In fact, Jeremy barely rises above verbal shorthand: “Hey” is his preferred greeting, and “VTS” his code for “very true statement.” Yet, as a teen diarist, Jeremy reaches near-literate glory, rolling out hilariously run-on sentences about marijuana etiquette, his bargain-hunting dad and, most of all, the bodacious glories of Renee Shopmaker, the new girl in school who, by an act of delicious fate, sits near him in Spanish. Renee is Laura to Jeremy’s Petrarch, and Weisberg makes sure that we jaded adults feel a twinge of longing every time this unobtainable Charlie’s Angel passes Jeremy in the hall. Weisberg resists curdling this sweet tale with irony and condescension, and he never allows Jeremy to scorn his clueless contemporaries. Like his teenage alter ego, Weisberg deserves an A.

*

TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH SLAVE GIRL

By Kate McCafferty

Viking: 210 pp., $23.95

In the 17th century, periodic slave revolts--led by bondsmen and women from West Africa--rocked the colony of Barbados. These uprisings were abetted, much to the alarm of the English overlords, by Irish indentured laborers, virtual slaves who lived and worked alongside the Africans in the Bajan cane fields. Kate McCafferty’s debut is an acute examination of this hidden chapter of the New World and the surprising truths attached to it: that indentured servitude was, in effect, slavery; that the English kidnapped and enslaved Irish Catholics; and that Irish and black slaves cooperated in their daily toils and shared eye-opening cross-cultural experiences. In time, they rose up together against their masters, and, as in the case of McCafferty’s heroine, Cot Quashey, formed families. After the most recent failed uprising, Cot, now middle-aged, is hauled in for interrogation by Peter Coote, a bureaucrat mostly concerned with the condition of his frilly cuffs. Coote gets more than he bargains for, as Cot tells of her abduction from the streets of Galway, her long years in Barbados and her eventual love for Quashey, a Muslim slave dedicated to Jihad. Cot’s rambling testimony makes Coote, by turns, impatient and sympathetic. Despite all the riveting multicultural history unveiled here, the reader, too, occasionally echoes Coote’s interjections to get on with it. Still, McCafferty’s imagined oral record is convincing--a harrowing tall tale about events too long ignored by textbooks.

*

IT’S HOW YOU PLAY THE GAME

By Jimmy Gleacher

Scribner: 256 pp., $23

Jack, the narrator of Jimmy Gleacher’s debut, is 26 and sells advertising in Boulder, Colo. Unlike many fictional twentysomethings, Jack isn’t logging hours on the dating treadmill or wasting time in a soulless cubicle or caught up in a murderous plot. Maybe he should be, because Gleacher’s plans for Jack are infinitely more complicated, even as the surface of this heartfelt genial comedy retains its deceptive simplicity and shrink-wrapped gloss. Jack, tender sprout though he be, is married, actually enjoys his job, and the only thing threatening his health seems to be his own nagging insecurity. But soon enough we find that Jack’s marriage--to a thoroughly out-there rich girl named Hope--is a nightmare, that his job isn’t nearly up to his wife’s standards and that a mysterious graffiti artist is scribbling threatening messages on the windows of his favorite deli. With chapter headings that resemble a family board-game closet (“Concentration,” “Boggle,” “Twister,” “Battleship”), the book continually reminds us that Jack is trying to suss out the rules of life. Yet, most often, it is Jack who is being played, as Hope gets him mixed up in a scheme to sell fruit-flavored beer, convinces him that he should be a writer, reiterates how much her mother hates him and eventually orders him to leave. What saves “It’s How You Play the Game” from being formulaic guy fiction is that Gleacher isn’t content merely to show us the game. Rather, he homes in on the players’ strategies and bluffs and doubts: the relentless and, in Gleacher’s views, ultimately necessary, gamesmanship of love, class and self.