FIRST FICTION

The Laments

George Hagen

Random House: 376 pp., $24.95

“Laments move -- it’s what we do.” So says Julia Lament to her young son Will in George Hagen’s entertaining saga about a Rhodesian family that roams from continent to continent, from one Anglophone outpost to the next. Julia is reiterating the Lament credo as laid down by her husband, Howard, a sensitive and brilliant engineer with a vast future ahead of him. But what ensues is a bumpy ride from Rhodesia to Bahrain to England and finally the United States, where the intrepid Laments arrive just in time for the tumultuous Nixon era. The Laments’ personal tumults arrive one after another in Hagen’s matter-of-fact sentences, whose tone veers from mildly astonished to twee, recalling another wizard of tragicomedy, John Irving.

Covering so much ground and time (the narrative picks up with Howard and Julia in the 1950s and ends some time after Watergate), “The Laments” never gets bogged down. Yet with all that forward motion, the Laments are bound to lose something along the way, which they do at every whistle-stop: Howard loses the plot of his own ambition; Julia eventually finds a career but loses the freshness of her initial years with Howard. For Will (who became their son after an outrageous maternity ward mishap), it’s a question of losing play pals, creepy bullies and various cute girls; and for the younger twins, Julius and Marcus, the losses promise something far more awful and irreplaceable.

Hagen offers no end of tart apercus on the English-speaking world and its obsessions with race, class and career. Concerning England, Hagen writes of Julia’s complaints in a way that neatly sums up the place: “the odor of roast beef, the awful knocking sound when she turned on the water, the twins’ constantly runny noses, the lack of sun, the surfeit of rain, and the queen’s obnoxious corgis.” America gets the treatment too when the Laments settle in New Jersey and encounter cookie-cutter subdivisions, ethnicity-preoccupied neighbors, knee-jerk jingoism, the onset of feminist consciousness, Cheever-esque backyard barbecues and an ice storm that ends in surreal tragedy. Part travelogue, part melodrama and part tall tale, “The Laments” is the playful and heartfelt story of a family -- and a world -- that can’t sit still.

*

The Mating Season

Alex Brunkhorst

St. Martin’s: 228 pp., $22.95

Zorka CARPENTER isn’t quite right. Her parents were both lookers, but, she tells us, “things must have gone wrong in the cooling process, for the results were less than spectacular.” Homely and shy, young Zorka appears destined to remain in the shadows of her friends, the snobby Zoe Christie and the architecture-mad Kris Tina Woo. And she threatens, too, to get swallowed up by the willful eccentricities of “The Mating Season,” a whimsical fairy tale that links Zorka’s coming of age with midcentury-Modern architecture and zoology, the strands of the author Alex Brunkhorst’s oddball helix.

After her father leaves home and her mother dies, a teenage Zorka becomes immoderately attached to the animal kingdom, adopting 310 critters that she calls by their familiar names: Tarantula, Seahorse, Ladybug. She lands a job at Dr. Cossman’s famous Cactusarium, where the spiky specimens remind Zorka of herself. Meanwhile, Kris Tina, now an architect-in-training at Princeton, embarks on a world tour to track down the works of the elusive Modernist Richard Dorsey and offers Zorka a chance to live in her own Woo Case Study House No. 1, a big glass number that becomes the perfect home for the menagerie.

Then, while shopping at Das Haus Retro, Zorka bumps into Dorsey himself, and the two embark on an affair despite the fact that she knows nothing of “eemz” or “noytra.” The unlikely lovers travel to a desert town called 1959, famous for its milkshakes and landmark motels. Can their romance survive outside this hermetic vintage environment?

Brunkhorst revels in the notion that Zorka exists at the nexus of nature and artifice and that, perhaps, love does too. But with a heroine who converses with a millipede and reads aloud to cactuses, this rococo fable could use a dose of Dorsey’s Minimalism: Besotted with the clean lines of Modernism, “The Mating Season” inexplicably covers itself in a riot of wallpaper.