First Fiction

Ask Me Anything

Francesca Delbanco

W.W. Norton: 348 pp., $23.95

The stuff of Francesca Delbanco’s absurdly entertaining comic novel -- about advice columnist and aspiring actress Rosalie Preston’s various encounters with New York and being 26 -- is familiar enough. Delbanco’s zinger-laden cadences come direct from the glossy pages of Seventeen and Elle: “I thought blackly about how all my friends had gotten their acts together and turned into wretched little Responsible Citizens, with careers and relationships and ardent dreams of matching flatware.”

Those rhetorically hanging questions that pulsate with big-theme significance owe a little something to “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw: “What if the patterns and rules governing love were just as incomprehensible and random to me as they were to my readers?” And there’s no end of Bridget Jonesian angst, spelled out in aphoristic Post-its to the self: “Concrete unhappiness is an autumn hayride, compared with generally unfocused misery.”

Yet the wistful and wisecracking Rosalie is a winning screwball heroine for the Age of the Cubicle, as much Elizabeth Wurtzel as Holly Golightly. When she’s not unpacking the secrets of heavy petting to the teen readership of Girl Talk magazine, she’s laboring over a leaden monologue from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” She and her Harvard pals have an off-off-off Broadway troupe, the First Borns, and they’re all terribly devoted to each other and their craft. But now they’re fanning out like a forage party into the wilds of adulthood. Rosalie, for her part, embarks on a top-secret tryst with her best friend’s father, financier and theater underwriter Berglan Starkler. With Starkler, Rosalie feels like a modern-day Margaret Mead “trolling around in a dying culture ... of chivalrous fat-wallet philandering.”

In any self-respecting romantic comedy there’s an uncouth underdog, and “Ask Me Anything’s” is the roguish Irish playwright Declan Pearse. Keep your eye on him in the late rounds. That’s when all of Delbanco’s disparate and seemingly unpromising elements -- publishing biz, improv theater, adultery, volunteer work with the aged -- threaten to reduce to true love or, at least, a summer Shakespeare festival somewhere in Virginia.

*

My Tender Matador

Pedro Lemebel

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

Grove Press: 170 pp., $20

In this overheated novella, a kind of fever dream of Santiago in the summer of 1986, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel entwines the fates of a transvestite, an undergraduate revolutionary, dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chile. If all politics is personal, then the Queen of the Corner, Lemebel’s aging gender-bending heroine, personally couldn’t care less. She’s more concerned with flitting around the barrio and singing along with “Besame Mucho” on Santiago’s golden-oldies station.

That is, until the Queen encounters Carlos, a handsome student whose political fervor and personal charms induce her to transform her apartment into a storage depot for an endless parade of mysterious boxes. Filled with what, who knows? The Queen is a “smitten sissy,” and she doesn’t mind being manipulated by her hopelessly straight crush or, worse, sitting on top of a vast cache of treasonous anti-Pinochet paraphernalia.

The Queen has a tendency to rhapsodize about “the carnal microphone that amplifies her radiophonic libation.” But this hot-house flower of a book works best when it’s at its most droll: skewering the dictator and his constantly clucking, Versace-obsessed wife. We see the two of them bearing the ignominy of getting turned away from a South African airport, bickering about the purchase of one of Hitler’s pistols and railing against “that Neruda character.”

The General reserves his most potent scorn for would-be revolutionaries such as Carlos: “They’re just mama’s boys who recite poems about love and machine guns.” When the windows are shot out of the dictator’s limousine, Senora Pinochet assures the shaken country that the blessed Virgin has saved her husband. Can’t you see her holy face in the shattered glass?

Operatic, garish and often baffling, “My Tender Matador” is defiantly, flamingly over-the-top; it makes your typical color-saturated Pedro Almodovar film look positively wan.