First Fiction

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, Gabriel Brownstein, W.W. Norton: 224 pp., $23.95

In this irresistible collection of stories by Gabriel Brownstein, a prewar apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side becomes an outsized cabinet of wonder whose curiosities are the tenants themselves. The title story finds an aspiring early-century couple (he’s Jewish, she’s a Southern WASP) giving birth to an alarmingly Old World octogenarian who’s every bit as perplexed by his bizarre predicament as his parents are: “I used to be, if I remember correct, Mr. Solomon Uschitz ....” Now called Benjamin Button, the erstwhile Uschitz grows up to be an elderly hot jazz pianist known as the “Hey-Hey Hebrew,” a devoted middle-age husband, an archetypal 1970s stoner and finally a helpless infant. “A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E” tells of the eccentric young Kevin MacMichaelman, who transforms his late parents’ apartment into the creepy “MacMichaelman Museum of Kevin,” complete with vitrine-housed memorabilia and taxidermied family pets. In “Bachelor Party,” a Jewish groom-to-be tells his friends the disquieting tale of a long-ago erotic psychodrama in which his then-girlfriend, a shiksa bombshell whose ancestors happened to be Nazis, demanded to be treated like a Holocaust victim. And “The Dead Fiddler, 5E” is the ballad of lovely Jessica Lenzner, an overachieving teen whose pneumatic charms are as much an object of general fascination as her sad fate: being forced to marry the ultra-Orthodox Shmelke Motl when her psychoanalyst dad suddenly gets religion.

Many of the building’s improbable narratives are related by Davey Birnbaum, an adolescent resident whose motley collection of friends grows up on West 89th Street playing Dungeons and Dragons, tossing Nerf footballs and arguing the respective merits of Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett Majors. This achy undercurrent of nostalgia buoys up Brownstein’s big themes -- thorny stuff like assimilation, voyeurism and role-playing -- and the stories themselves are often, curiously enough, reinventions of narratives first put down by Kafka, Fitzgerald and Hawthorne.

But Brownstein’s more immediate precursors are Jeffrey Eugenides, whose “Virgin Suicides” evoked a similarly tweaked pubescent environment, and Steven Millhauser, whose youthful dreamers construct deliciously overwrought microcosms of Americana. As inventive as it is endearing, and as hilarious as it is often horrific, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W” is a handsome edifice, a breathing monument to childhood, to Manhattan, and, in its good-natured way, to literature itself.

*

Moist, Mark Haskell Smith, LA Weekly Books/St. Martin’s: 310 pp., $24.95

Mark Haskell Smith’s energetic thriller is an ode to the hard-boiled Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy spun out in brighter-than-life Starburst colors: “A city where roses and cacti grew side by side and bright orange-and-purple birds of paradise sprang up out of cracks in the sidewalk.” Across this Day-Glo wonderland, Smith stretches an unlikely cast (and an even more unlikely plot), starting with Bob, a lanky dude who works in a pathology lab, and his girlfriend, Maura, a masturbation therapist. When a severed arm shows up at the lab, Bob is immediately taken by the bodacious babe tattooed on it; it’s as if he’s transformed into a slacker Petrarch and she’s his mythic, ink-on-flesh Laura. The arm’s owner turns out to be a foot soldier in a Mexican American mob, and Bob, of course, gets mixed up with these quarrelsome hoodlums. In fact, he ditches Maura to pursue his criminal destiny as “Roberto” (and to pursue the girl in the tattoo), while Maura hooks up with the LAPD detective assigned to the severed-arm case. And this, really, is only the half of it.

Like its bold palette, “Moist” is aggressively over the top, yet each bizarre turn is as stubbornly logical as it is wonderfully impossible. And it’s a small, precious miracle that this L.A. story boldly surges ahead for more than 200 pages before anyone even mentions a screenplay. No wonder Bob -- Roberto -- is so psyched to live in Smith’s “city of the future, hope of the world.”