First Fiction

Love Monkey

Kyle Smith

William Morrow: 336 pp., $23.95

Tom FARRELL is an avowed manboy: a guy whose idea of chefdom isn’t Batali, it’s Keebler; who fantasizes about girls dressed only in Reddi-wip; who, at 32, is unable to discern his lower extremities under his “big quivering Hostess Sno-Ball belly”; who subsists on ramen noodles and his salary at a New York tabloid called Tabloid. Tom, in other words, is an action figure of modern dudeness, and his creator, Kyle Smith, wants to jolt us into the shocking realization that young single males are not a tribe of ready, willing and able Ken dolls.

Like Tom’s taste in cuisine, “Love Monkey” is literary junk food for the Hungry-Man soul. The marketing whizzes behind this testosterone-fueled screwball comedy call it “Lad Lit,” as if it could be sold like a new flavor of Doritos. “Love Monkey” is, at times, deeply hilarious and incriminatingly insightful, but there’s nothing new here. Enterprising manboys like Nick Hornby have been around for years, and dudes have always written about being dudes.

Smith admits as much with his many allusions to “The Sun Also Rises,” a colossus of the guy canon. Tom’s personal Lady Brett is a thong-wearing twentysomething named Julia, an unstable girlwoman seemingly made to drive any manboy mad with REM-soundtracked lust. But Julia has a boyfriend, “a Jew named Dwayne,” as an incredulous Tom tells us. Our manboy hero is thus forced to make the rounds with non-Julias who are either drunken flings, momentary obsessions or best friends who could be The One.

Julia is the unobtainable idee fixe that keeps Tom in the serial-dating market, showing Smith, when he’s not riffing on body parts, to be an able sociologist of love. But he’s at his best whenever he brings in Rollo Thrash, the aged, booze-saturated Tabloid hack modeled after the New York Post’s indestructible Steve Dunleavy. Rollo, all gin breath and woozy advice, is a manboy emeritus whose gleeful irresponsibility somehow bumps Tom up the Tabloid ladder. By the end of this manboy manifesto, Tom, Cocoa Puffs and all, finally gets in touch with his inner Ken.

*

An Empty Room

Talitha Stevenson

Carroll & Graf: 218 pp., $23

Talitha STEVENSON, the author of “An Empty Room,” which was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Whitbread first-novel award, bears a resemblance to her love-torn heroine, Emily. Both are 19, fetching (a Vogue-ready head shot of Stevenson strategically replaces the traditional back-cover blurbs) and approach life with a mixture of microscopic involvement and studied remove. Emily, the mildly turbulent heart of this achy melodrama, is as existentially disconnected from all things as she is up to her tender earlobes in them. Similarly, Stevenson has created an acute yet aloof soap opera of the young-adult self.

Compared to recent offerings from such gaspingly youthful novelists as David Amsden and Cecelia Ahern, “An Empty Room” has an all-grown-up elegance. It’s about being 19 and confronting the thorny adult world, as Emily hooks up with Tom, a wayward lad whose parents shared a house with Emily’s parents back in their salad days. Like Emily, Tom is cooling his heels before the onslaught of university, responsibility, life.

Together, they’re drawn into a lazy erotic arrangement driven by cuteness, easy access to Tom’s car and the historic entanglement of their folks -- his, divorced; hers, stubbornly hanging on. “I always thought there was nothing safer than lying in the arms of someone you don’t love,” Emily tells us. It’s one of many sentences here -- about honesty, love and lust -- that can be read several ways.

The notion of truth becomes increasingly slippery when Emily falls for Simon, Tom’s 26-year-old married cousin. As Simon and Emily secretly entwine themselves, Emily finds herself swimming in questions of infatuation and fidelity: “I loved someone for the way he said he loved someone else,” she admits. In other words, Simon’s devotion to his wife, however compromised, is a major turn-on. As precocious as it is, “The Empty Room” does occasionally read like Adultery 101. But Stevenson has given us something refreshing: a wide-eyed, even innocent, take on the loss of innocence.