FIRST FICTION

A Few Short Notes

on Tropical

Butterflies

John Murray

HarperCollins: 274 pp.; $24.95

The men and women who populate John Murray’s brilliant stories -- each of which has the heft of a novel -- tend to know a thing or two about Escherichia coli and Shigella, about the vascular techniques needed to repair major blood vessels and about the difference between a simple monarch butterfly and the colossal Queen Alexandria’s Birdwing. They’re experts in science and medicine (or, at least, practitioners learning to scrape by in tough situations), and, as narrators, they toss out lines you’ve never encountered before in a work of fiction: “Maya treats every brain she works on with such respect.... “ They’re into taxonomy and anatomy, hands-on knowledge and empirical data. And they often find themselves in life-threatening Third World situations, where the need for action is clarifying, and where you might go, as one volunteer in Africa puts it, if you want “life-or-death, all-or-nothing situations.”

But as much as Murray’s neurosurgeons and entomologists seek out -- often at grave risk -- a rational, black-and-white world, they’re continually confronted by unknowable gray areas. In the exceptional title story, the grandson of a butterfly-obsessed Victorian gentleman continues to reap the collateral damage associated with his grandfather’s consuming passion. In “The Hill Station,” an infectious-disease expert finds that her clinical mastery can’t contain the onslaught of microbiology that confronts her in Bombay. “White Flour” finds a son caught in an unlikely global cross-fire between his paleontologist mother, an Indian woman living in North Carolina, and his father, a North Carolinian working to control outbreaks of tuberculosis in India. And “Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man” tells the astonishing story of an Indian family in Iowa during the Vietnam era, in which a son’s destiny swings between his surgeon father’s insistence on duty and his mother’s appeals for peace. Like the doctor who belatedly discovers that “we are more than just anatomy,” this wise, compassionate and exquisite book valiantly wrestles with the eternal dichotomy of mind and body.

*

Important Things

That Don’t Matter

David Amsden

William Morrow: 266 pp., $24.95

To the burgeoning crowd of just-out-of-adolescence novelists comes David Amsden with this diverting coming-of-age tale, told in episodic spurts: an appropriately disjointed strategy for a writer barely older than MTV. What’s startling here, aside from the fact that “Important Things That Don’t Matter” actually seems to matter, is that the frames of reference for Amsden’s and his unnamed narrator are so refreshingly un-Generation X. There are no sidelong references to “Scooby-Doo” or Journey. Step off, graying Lollapalooza Nation: Your cherished signifiers of cultural irony have been replaced by “Beverly Hills, 90210” and the Spin Doctors.

Yet the world in which Amsden’s boy hero grows up is universally familiar: “One-story look-alike homes of wood and moldy aluminum, small driveways leading to clapboard carports, cul-de-sacs framed by scraggly dogwoods.” It’s the suburbs of D.C., but it could be anywhere. Similarly, this child of divorce has an emblematic, timeless aura, rammed home by his fondness for Holden Caulfield-esque turns of phrase. His largely AWOL father, an underachieving cokehead who works in places such as KFC, is tartly summed up: “Dad was at a point in his life where he was forty years old and would end up talking to you for an hour about rotisserie chickens and not even know it.” As the father’s absenteeism mounts, the scorn becomes withering: “You should have seen the guy when he showed up at my apartment. The most perverted minds at Kodak couldn’t concoct such a reunion.”

Like any self-respecting young person, Amsden gets by on being a wiseacre. But there’s a smart, understated lyricism to his Kodachrome evocations of teenage ups and downs. And finally there’s the grudging, slow-blossoming love for his hard-working mother -- an undeniably important thing that gives this often sneering book, and its wounded hero, some much-needed heart.