FIRST FICTION

Crossing California

Adam Langer

Riverhead Books: 434 pp., $24.95

Toward the back end of Adam Langer’s extraordinary first novel, Muley Scott Wills -- a multiethnic and multi-tasking Chicago teenager who is, in some ways, the soul of the book -- is busy cooking up yet another movie project, “one for which he was trying to film every inch of West Rogers Park.” In Muley’s precociously fecund mind, his homemade opus (peopled with his assorted friends) “would create a new animated world, one that would illustrate all the invisible borders that existed between them.”

Langer’s project is no less audacious, pursuing, as it does with nearly adolescent zeal, the project of re-creating West Rogers Park, a far-north Chicago neighborhood, in the years 1979 to 1981. “Crossing California,” whose title alludes to the north-south thoroughfare that divides West Rogers Park’s comfortable bourgeoisie from its striving middle-middle class, is panoramic in its scope and snapshot-like in its detail. It is the Midwestern cousin of Jonathan Lethem’s stirring bestseller “The Fortress of Solitude,” and Langer’s Chicago is no less full of intelligent mischief than Lethem’s Brooklyn.

Of course, “Crossing California” isn’t just a geography course, it’s the branching and twining story -- too multifaceted to outline here -- of various Rogers Park kids and their generally miserable parents. On the east side of California, there’s Muley, writer, filmmaker and radio commentator, born of a black substitute teacher and a Jewish record-industry mogul; Jill Wasserstrom, Laura to Muley’s Petrarch, a rabble-rouser who threatens to quote Antonio Gramsci at her bat mitzvah; Michelle Wasserstrom, Jill’s older sister, a hottie with a lush headful of curls (an “Isro”) who loves the theater, swear words, pot, sex and embodying Peachy Moskowitz, a fictional Russian emigre invented by Muley Wills. Over on the posh west side, you have Lana Rovner, part Nellie Oleson and part Nancy Reagan, a Jewish princess and kleptomaniac; and her older brother, Larry, lead singer and drummer in Rovner!, the “Jerusarock” outfit known for such fist-pumping anthems as “(My Love Ain’t) Always Orthodox.”

Larry loves the Mishna as much as he does Led Zeppelin. Langer, too, approaches West Rogers Park with a mixture of Talmudic thoroughness and arena-rock swagger, perfectly evoking a lost era of burnt-orange beanbag chairs, “do bongs” graffiti, rowdy sex-ed classes and “Disco Sucks” T-shirts. There’s an achy undercurrent of loss here: After all, it’s morning in America, and those beanbag chairs and bongs are about to be swept away. In Langer’s hands, the divide between decades is as indelible as California Avenue’s class demarcations. “Crossing California” is all about cusps, those “invisible borders” that Muley is so determined to capture on film: the divides of age, race, sexual orientation, marital status, class, geography, politics and time. The period that Langer conjures up, straddling the addled idealism of the 1970s and the winner-takes-all 1980s, was, arguably, the last major turning point in American life. In this rich saga worthy of Philip Roth and Anthony Trollope, Langer has finally given us its definitive document.

*

A Movie ...

and a Book

Daniel Wagner

Alfred A. Knopf: 128 pp., $17.95

“Observe your life from the third person, and if it’s funny or strange, it’s a movie.” So says Lou, a castaway on a desert island in this wisp of a book that’s barely a novella. Lou goes on to explain to Liz, his co-castaway, that life is a book when “something dramatic is happening to you.” Got it?

The movie-versus-book concept, such as it is, comprises the hazy underpinnings of Daniel Wagner’s experimental debut, a postmodern riff that feels more like a treatment than a finished product. We get the agonizingly familiar idea that Lou and Liz are fictional characters and that their puppeteer is a frustrated novelist named Jim who feeds off the narrative advice of his video-game-addicted brother, Andy. Yes, Jim is kind of a book and Andy is, well, a movie. In the meantime, nothing much happens, giving Wagner time for digressions on solar power, bestsellers and underpants. As Liz and Lou take to the high seas to escape their fate (part Gilligan, part Jorge Luis Borges), the reader, alas, also yearns for a life raft.