FIRST FICTION

THE WINTER ZOO

By John Beckman

Henry Holt: 352 pp., $25

“Nothing had ever happened to Gurney. He had swerved through life like Mr. Magoo.” Gurney is the recent undergraduate at the heart of John Beckman’s sprawling, messy and thoroughly mesmerizing first novel, a fascinating gazette of twentysomething American expats and their eye-opening explorations of Krakow in 1990. It’s the heady era after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Gurney has managed to flee a more intimate kind of totalitarianism: His girlfriend back in Iowa has just had his baby and he’s opted for disreputable liberation, buying a ticket to Krakow, where his cousin, Jane, has installed herself as a kind of slacker sexpot Gertrude Stein. Welcome to the new Lost Generation.

In Krakow, the unworldly Gurney finds himself “on the frontier of ethics--a beautiful world where anything goes!” He’s surrounded by young Americans overstimulated by exile: They take day trips to Auschwitz, organize cabaret evenings that recall Berlin in the ‘30s and attempt “to look more Polish than the Poles.”

But the decadence isn’t all for show. Jane is a formidable sexual predator, manipulator and gossip; Jackie, with whom Gurney has an urgent fling, is embroiled in a tense sexual detente with her erstwhile lover, Linda; and Wanda, the Polish teenager whose broken family hosts Jane and Gurney, is awakening to a libidinous obsession with Gurney, the tall, boyish, redheaded amerykanski who has landed in her midst. And, as Beckman increasingly insinuates, Jane and Gurney (who’s now working as a croupier at a seedy casino) could, at any moment, lapse into classically Byronic relations.

With the possibility of a many-sided menage hanging in the sooty Krakow air, Beckman expertly zeroes in on the unbearable tension that so much freedom creates. It’s as if excessive liberty and hopeless entanglement are two opposing machines of history that threaten to pulverize anyone caught between them, including everyone in Beckman’s Altman-sized cast.

When Dick Chesnutt, a 40-year-old American pop singer and sexual titan (his collection of Polaroids could have made actor Bob Crane blush) is murdered by Wanda’s psycho dad, “The Winter Zoo” transforms itself from Henry Miller on a Eurailpass into a scary post-Soviet thriller.

With so much going on, Beckman’s novel threatens to collapse, like the Iron Curtain, under its own weighty ambition. Yet Beckman manages to keep “The Winter Zoo” cruising along. He has a wonderful sense of how the personal and political overlap (Krakow’s awakening to capitalism is every bit as reckless as the expats’ erotic gamesmanship), and his rootless young adults are, at once, spoiled children and jaded libertines. Their pursuit of authenticity is so relentless that you begin to suspect that the true object of their yearnings is Krakow itself: the crumbling old Polish city that has become, for them, a slummers’ Prague, the ultimate anti-Iowa.

In the end, as Gurney takes off for destinations unknown, “The Winter Zoo” becomes a canny critique of the American way of youth, where the expat antidote to four years of dorm life is just as desperate and calculated as a four-kegger at State.

*

ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY

By Rose Connors

Scribner: 304 pp., $24

Marty Nickerson, an assistant D.A. on Cape Cod and the gumshoe heroine of Rose Connors’ good-natured mystery, is an unlikely sleuth. Her knowledge of the law, her unavoidable entrenchment in Barnstable County Courthouse politics and her good conscience all work against her when the brutal murder case she’s prosecuting unravels before her eyes: Just when Manuel Rodriguez is sentenced for killing a popular 20-year-old college student, another body turns up on one of the Cape’s idyllic beaches, suggesting that the crafty murderer is still out there.

What ensues is a standard-issue race against the clock, as Marty tries to buck a system intent on convictions regardless of truth and to track down a murderer whose signature is carving Roman numerals into the torsos of his victims (the tally eventually reaches III). But what brings “Absolute Certainty” into tight focus is Marty herself, an earnest single mom who’s not immune to the charms of her rumpled courtroom adversary turned unlikely ally, Harry Madigan. As Marty sets out to crack the case and possibly forfeit her job, she takes us on a tour of the Cape that includes amusing asides about local tuna brokers and the rather thrilling observation that the Chatham dump “plays Chopin on Sunday afternoons.”

The effect of Marty’s local pride is as disarming as “Absolute Certainty’s” conclusions about justice, human nature and a serial killer’s attempts to elude capture are gruesome.