FIRST FICTION

The Half-Life

Jonathan Raymond

Bloomsbury USA: 368 pp., $23.95

Jonathan RAYMOND’s ambitious first novel is as wild, sprawling and open to possibility as the Oregon country -- both of the distant past and near present -- that it charts. It’s a story that’s really a series of stories within stories, and if, at times, we can’t see the ancient rain forest for the trees, it’s all the better to serve Raymond’s conceit: that racial and national identities are as evanescent as sunlight through a dense redwood canopy.

The half-life of the title is a metaphor that cuts in multiple directions. It alludes to the pair of friendships that bookend the book’s outsized action. First, there are the two halves of Cookie Figowitz and his pal Henry, trapper-types in the old Oregon Territory opened by Lewis and Clark. Cookie (who gets his name by way of his culinary skills) learns two things about Oregon that seem to hold true forever: “Oregon was not new, in fact, but incredibly old” and that there’s “[n]o real magistrate or governor. Just the corporation.”

These elegantly tossed-off dicta certainly describe the Oregon of the 1980s, where a teenager named Tina has emigrated with her mother from California. In a Portland commune, Tina encounters an ex-hippie community forever making wisecracks about the Reagan era and musing on how Oregon -- and America -- just aren’t what they used to be.

The utopian aura generated by this band of addled idealists recalls the camaraderie of the trapping companies of yore, and it is here that Tina meets her own Henry in Trixie, a precocious girl given to writing screenplays and dropping acid.

How to begin describing where “The Half-Life” chases its inexhaustible wanderlust? Cookie and Henry go about extracting castoreum oil from beavers and booking passage to China in order to tap the Cantonese market, while Tina and Trixie go about fundraising for an ambitious film project about the history of the lobotomy, growing pot as an elegant solution to their financing dilemma.

Actually, the pot is Trixie’s idea, one that echoes Cookie and Henry’s off-the-wall entrepreneurialism and good old American gumption.

But the best story here is ripped from the headlines, as Neil -- the commune’s mellow overlord -- discovers two skeletons on the marshy property, perfectly preserved. Cookie and Henry? The mystery -- which drives this otherwise lumbering book -- is ratcheted up by the interest of a local forensic anthropologist with his carbon-dating techniques (again, the half-life) and the maneuverings of Jay Feather, Chinook spokesman, who insists the remains must be Native American.

With so much swirling around, you sometimes wish Raymond would provide moss on the trees for navigational purposes. As entertaining and audacious as “The Half-Life” is, there’s an alarming lack of focus as the book moves forward, as if Raymond were himself intoxicated by the abundant pink duckweed, maidencane and cannabis sativa that overgrow his narrative.

Even so, as a modern recasting of the America of genial con men, suckers and searchers portrayed by Melville in “The Confidence-Man,” “The Half-Life” is a potent fairy tale of who we are, how we got here and the unknowable history under our feet.

*

Here Kitty Kitty

Jardine Libaire

Little, Brown: 220 pp. $22.95

The New York of Jardine Libaire’s darkly comic contribution to the burgeoning genre of ditz lit is cribbed from the breathless pages of Interview and New York magazines. It’s all Nobu and Raoul’s, Versace and Vivienne Westwood, all the time. Libaire’s heroine -- or, more appropriately, anti-heroine -- is Lee, the foxy manager of a Tribeca bistro who fancies herself a painter.

Is she tragically hip or just tragic? It’s impossible to tell, as Lee zigzags from Manhattan to Brooklyn to the Hamptons, propelled by cocaine and Baileys Irish Cream and faced with a daunting decision: the elderly, elegant millionaire who may soon become a soup-dribbling invalid or the strapping slacker bartender? Will it be foie gras or biceps?

“You know when your life is not adding up to more than the sum of its parts?” Lee asks early on. By the end, it’s an open question precisely what this predictable romp has added up to, with its punchy Joan Didion cadences and Christina Aguilera dreams.