FIRST FICTION

LAST YEAR’S JESUS

By Ellen Slezak

Theia/Hyperion: 256 pp., $22.95

“Detroit had become a city you leave.” So writes Ellen Slezak in this impressive collection of stories whose common antihero is Detroit itself, with its endless grid of charmless suburbs and its hollowed-out center of crumbling apartment blocks. Staying and leaving are central preoccupations for Slezak’s Detroit folk, who are mostly Polish and tend to punch the clock at Chrysler Forge and Axle or at GM’s Hamtramck Assembly Plant. In “Settled,” Slezak shows that the suburban exodus doesn’t apply merely to the living but to the deceased, too, when the body of a little girl is disinterred from a Detroit cemetery and relocated to spiffier digs outside the city. “Here in Car City” tells of a quixotic woman who opens a Euro-style pensione on a bombed-out street downtown, and then witnesses the improbable comings and goings of her lodgers. And in “Tomato Watch,” a 96-year-old Polish grandfather ends up wandering down one of the city’s teeming highways, brandishing tomatoes he has grown in the front yard. Slezak closes her story cycle--whose episodes don’t overlap but whose strong sense of place suggests a Motor City version of “Dubliners”--with “Head, Heart, Legs or Arms,” a short novella that manages to seamlessly connect the 1967 riots, the Tigers’ quest for the pennant, a serial killer on the loose at U. of M. and a young girl dying of cancer. It’s an amazing meditation on a long-ago troubled summer, on growing up in weird times, and, like all of “Last Year’s Jesus” (whose title refers to an actor in a Passion Play), on an iconic American metropolis in deep distress.

*

THINK OF ENGLAND

By Alice Elliott Dark

Simon & Schuster: 272 pp., $24

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of two acclaimed story collections, and her debut novel has the same finely observed, hushed ambience that makes her stories so seductive. “Think of England” unfolds in three distinct sections, as if each were a short story that outgrew the confines of the genre. And yet there’s nothing artificial about calling this remarkable triptych--which zeroes in on the years 1964, 1979 and 2000--a novel: The story of Jane MacLeod unfolds beautifully across “Think of England’s” three panels, each one a perfect evocation of its time and place.

The book opens on a Sunday evening in February 1964, when the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It’s a resonant cultural marker, but for 9-year-old Jane, living outside Philadelphia and in love with George Harrison, it marks the death of her father, who dies in a road accident later that night. When we catch up with Jane in 1979, she flees to London, determined to shed the stultifying suburbs and her bitter mom. Here, she enjoys the pleasures of exile, befriending the fabulous Colette and her fiance, Nigel, an aristocratic, Clash-era aristocrat. In the end, we find Jane in New York, now the mother of a daughter whose father was an anonymous sperm donor, attending a birthday bash for her ever-distant mother. As it delicately probes the often inconvenient ties that bind families and friends, “Think of England” uncovers a world of loneliness and missed connections: a London love affair prematurely ended, Harrison whizzing by in his Jaguar, a mother whose love pushes away her children and a father forever lost to tragedy.

*

GIRLS’ POKER NIGHT

By Jill A. Davis

Random House: 232 pp., $23.95

To the burgeoning genre that straddles “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Sex in the City” comes “Girls’ Poker Night,” the amiable tale of a capable young woman named Ruby Capote who comes to New York to write a “single girl on the edge, ledge, verge” column for a tabloid newspaper. Jill A. Davis has written for “The Late Show With David Letterman,” and the way she has Ruby describe her column would suggest that we’re in for a riotous sendup of all of those cookie-cutter “laugh-out-loud” Bridget clones. Unfortunately, as funny as Davis can be and as sympathetic as any single person younger than 40 in New York is, “Girls’ Poker Night” never takes a gamble, choosing instead to tell the familiar story of a woman working in publishing and falling in love with her somewhat complicated boss. Perhaps the problem is that we never really see how Ruby’s travails--aforesaid boss, ex-boyfriend who inexplicably hoarded plastic bread ties, creepy guy who wants to write on her with Magic Markers--connect to her writerly pursuits; we don’t actually see one of Ruby’s columns until the end, and by then it’s too little too late. As Ruby’s boss quite openly points out, “I just thought if you wrote about something more personal, but in this style it would be, you know, it would be great.” “Girls’ Poker Night,” alas, never raises the ante.