FIRST FICTION

The Book of Ralph

A Fiction

John McNally

Free Press: 304 pp., $24

Wading into “The Book of Ralph,” John McNally’s good-natured comic novel, is like entering a Sears catalog from the fall of 1978. The catalog, an American institution that seems to have gone the way of the carrier pigeon, figures in the book’s opening pages when McNally’s eighth-grade hero, Hank Boyd, ponders a wacko theory concocted by his ne’er-do-well buddy Ralph: that classmate Patty O’Dell can be found in the catalog’s trusty underwear pages.

It’s a fitting kickoff for this chronicle of Hank and Ralph’s improbable friendship, encapsulating McNally’s abiding sense of harmless PG-13 mischief, his connoisseurship of a well-mined bygone era, and his flair for evoking the familiar tribulations of nascent sexuality. Even so, a much finer start is found 189 pages in, when McNally’s narrative jerks back to “The Past: 1975.” Here, we find Hank and Ralph cementing their bond in fifth grade, working on dioramas depicting their South Chicago suburb in the distant future: 2001. While Hank turns in a futuristic metropolis of tin foil, Ralph, ever the daffy literalist, executes an astonishing to-scale model of his immediate neighborhood, missing the point entirely and exposing the inanity of the assignment. Patty’s undies have nothing on this inspired episode, inexplicably buried two-thirds of the way into the book.

Yet despite the structural gimmickry, “The Book of Ralph” is as conventional as can be. It hits all the major stops on its tour of ‘70s cultural detritus: CB radios, the music of Styx, “The Gong Show.” The taste of nostalgia is as sweetly congealed as the endless bowls of Count Chocula that Ralph slurps up. When the book finally lurches into 2001, we find the adult Hank back home, down on his luck, and, as if by fate, getting mixed up yet again with Ralph, the eternal Bad Influence.

McNally has them working for Ralph’s creepy cousins, cleaning up crime scenes -- “picking up bits of brain with tweezers, sopping up human blood.” It’s a belated attempt to cut through the syrup, transforming this well-meaning -- and often entertaining -- novel into a macabre episode of “That ‘70s Show.”

*

I Dream of

Microwaves

Imad Rahman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

256 pp., $23

The unlikely hero of this madcap collection of interlocking stories is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. No, not the Lakers’ Hall of Famer but a pudgy Pakistani American actor wannabe, a guy given to booze and busted-up relationships, drifting through life like a bit player. Typical self-assessment: “I’m the guy gets swallowed up by the scenery.” Or, as Mrs. Germany -- the Upper East Side sexpot who hires Kareem to walk her Jack Russell -- puts it, Kareem is the “sort of character that Belushi could play, but never the sort of character who could play Belushi.”

Even so, this harmless rogue moves through “I Dream of Microwaves” like a summer-stock vet gunning for a big break. He’s a scene stealer, and the scenes themselves are as outre as anything cooked up off-off-off-Broadway. In the title story, we learn that Kareem has a rich resume of playing dark-skinned criminals on “America’s Most Wanted,” experience that comes in handy when, posing as a Bosnian refugee, he attempts to run a confidence game on an unwitting Ohio grandmother. In “Eating, Ohio,” we find Kareem still stuck in the heartland, playing Zima Zorro in a sports bar. “Real, Actual Life” tells of Kareem’s playing an actual thug assigned to repossess a delinquent copy of “Forrest Gump” from a video-crazed Bollywood producer. And in the collection’s best story, “Call Me Manny,” Kareem takes to the rails like a hobo, only to be pressed into service by two bumbling drifters intent on exposing Middle Eastern terrorists in Florida.

If you suspect that author Imad Rahman doesn’t always grasp the difference between surreal and silly, you’re right. But, as these stories amble along from joke to joke (and movie quote to movie quote), what emerges is an alarmingly fuzzy -- and hilarious -- picture of post-Sept. 11 America, where identities and motivations blur and the horizontal hold refuses to hold.