FIRST FICTION

Paperback Original

William Rhode

Riverhead: 464 pp., $14 paper

William Rhode’s cartoony, crime-fueled travelogue of the Indian subcontinent is an unabashedly laddish answer to the ongoing spate of so-called chick lit. Its action, characters and chief concerns (namely, babes, motorbikes and a smattering of recreational drugs) could all have been taken from the cheesecake- and testosterone-saturated pages of Maxim, Loaded or Gear. And its hero, a young Englishman named Joshua King, describes himself in terms that would make the marketeers at those magazines proud: “I don’t want to make anything of my life. I just want to chill.”

But, sadly, there will be no chilling for Josh. His rich jerk of a father has suddenly overdosed on a stylish combination of 56 Viagras, 13 doses of Ecstasy “and a couple wraps of speed,” leaving Josh nothing but a recrimination-filled letter insisting, oddly enough, that Josh crank out a bestseller (starring his late father, of course) or forfeit his multimillion-dollar inheritance. Talk about harshing on your mellow.

Josh promptly sets about getting himself into loads of trouble, from Delhi (where he’d been enjoying a slack existence in a seedy guest house) to Mumbai (where he gets himself mixed up in a drug ring with ties to Bollywood) and on to various other locales, mostly fleeing danger and creating it at the same time. For some reason, Josh has decided that the best way to generate material for his hide-saving “paperback original” is to infiltrate a heroin mob and steal their diamonds. But wait, do these hoodlums even have diamonds? And what about his partner in crime, Yasmin, the Dutch knockout whose “boyfriend” was tossed into an Indian jail? Is she the “one,” or, fellow readers, just the Babe of the Week?

Perhaps she’s truly evil. For his part, Josh is a pretty decent fellow, except for when he’s selling heroin to children. Oops. This rough-and-tumble tall tale about a guy who stops at nothing to keep the family cash tries hard to be mordant and merry, but more often ends up being harmless and silly. After nearly 500 pages of this wild-goose chase, Rhode leans into us with a somewhat deflating revelation: “It’s really been about a guy who goes to India and finds himself. It’s as wonderfully simple and cheesy as that.”

*

Red Ant House

Ann Cummins

Mariner Books: 192 pp., $12 paper

In “Headhunter,” one of the 12 enigmatic stories that make up this collection from Ann Cummins, a scene unfolds that forces you to go back and reread it once or twice. Ginny, a female truck driver, reaches into the mouth of the drunk, leering motorist she has just ostensibly killed by butting his car over a cliff. She reaches in, waving flies out of her way, astonished to find so many teeth knocked loose by the impact, and alights upon the dead man’s sole gold tooth.

“She held the tooth near the gum, wedged her fingernails into the gum line, yanked, felt it give. ‘Jesus!’ she said, standing and stepping back.”

“Jesus” is right. There’s something lulling about the way Cummins tells a story, luring the reader in with fuzzy atmospheres, oddball children and their mysterious, often absentee, parents. There’s a gentle aura of reportage throughout this collection (many of the stories take place on or near Indian reservations in the Southwest) and a reluctance to let us know precisely what time period we’re in. And just when you’ve adjusted to the scenery, Cummins gives you a jolt -- that gold tooth violently extracted -- that you never see coming and which you can’t quite recover from.

In “Blue Fly,” the frontier denizens of a prairie sod hut make due without their wayward patriarch, and a teenage boy’s lonely sister-in-law unexpectedly proffers a seduction worthy of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” “The Hypnotist’s Trailer” finds a woman turning to a sketchy hypnosis practitioner to help beat her smoking habit, only to have the charlatan “steal” her navel and play her like an evil puppeteer while her daughter looks on in exasperation. And in “Starburst,” the sensible cop husband of a suspected kleptomaniac discovers the unanticipated thrill and comfort of combing through a neighbor’s lingerie drawer. As unvarnished as they are surreal, Cummins’ stories give a similarly illicit kick of fleeting yet indelible intimacy.