FIRST FICTION

¡Caramba!

Nina Marie Martinez

Alfred A. Knopf: 366 pp., $24.95

In the cheeky manifesto -- addressed “Dear Booksellers” and comprising a seven-point outline -- that emblazons promo copies of Nina Marie Martinez’s absurdly entertaining first novel, the author makes an obvious, though often underplayed, observation: “I believe that English and Spanish are living languages, hence they’re always changin.’ ” In “¡Caramba!,” not only are English and Spanish always changin’, they have an altogether delightful tendency to meld into each other, making Martinez, perhaps, the premier literary artist of an emerging tongue that can only be called Spanglish. Some examples, by way of opening randomly to Page 301: “It’s so rock and roll it’s mas rock and roll que el mero rocanrol.” “El momento que everybody has been waiting for, ya llego.” ¿Claro?

“¡Caramba!” is subtitled “A Tale Told in Turns of the Card,” and the turns in question come straight from Loteria, the familiar Mexican deck that’s heavy on the visuals and made up of such Tarot-like characters as “La Sirena” and “La Muerte.” It’s an apt narrative gambit, as Martinez’s tale unfolds with the skewed logic of a game of cards and is itself punctuated with striking imagery. In addition to the Loteria cards (which announce each chapter), there are grocery lists, classified ads, assorted Mexican-theme clip art, old-time Mexican tourist brochures and maps, the coded entries of a local jukebox and a page torn from a wildlife guide outlining the identifying features of the axolotl, an indigenous Mexican amphibian.

You might now be wondering what “¡Caramba!” is all about. It’s about two women in their 20s living in the California town of Lava Landing: Consuelo Constancia Gonzalez Contreras, who has legally changed her name to Consuelo Sin Verguenza (“shameless”), and her Anglo best friend, Natalie. It’s about Consuelo’s late father, Don Pancho, stuck in purgatory. It’s about a born-again mariachi named Javier and his witchcraft-practicing mother, Lulabell. It’s about the vixen Lucha, recently jailed for her involvement in moving tamales stuffed with polvo blanco and mala hierba. It’s about True-Dee, a beautician who’s “part mamacita, part papacito.” And it’s about a volcano that could blow at any moment.

“¡Caramba!” is a dizzying Mexican hat dance propelled by a soundtrack of norteno and Connie Francis, a Sternean shaggy perro story that makes Lava Landing both an up-to-the-minute Peyton Place and a post-Proposition 209 Mocambo.

*

The Honeymoon

Justin Haythe

Atlantic Monthly Press: 272 pp., $22

“It is a city inhabited almost entirely by tourists and there is something fraudulent to its old-world ways.” The city is Venice, the gilded setting for the second half of this exquisite emotional gothic from Justin Haythe, and the above observation comes from Gordon Garrety, Haythe’s worldly wise, 21-year-old narrator.

Like Gordon with his suspicions about Venice, “The Honeymoon” looks askance upon the beautiful and splendid, plumbing the stilted emotional depths of two wayward Americans who appear to have arrived via Henry James into the late 1980s -- Gordon and his mother, Maureen. Beauty itself mediates their every life decision: Maureen has been working (for decades, it seems) on an art connoisseur’s guide to Europe, and the two of them crisscross the Continent like a pair of Grand Touring vagabonds, guided by Maureen’s latest aesthetical whims and the long-suffering generosity of Theo, Gordon’s wealthy father.

For nouveaux riches, they live like old-school Stranded Gentry: “I grew up with the trappings of money,” Gordon tells us, “(if often without money itself).” Instead of dollars and cents, they have the National Portrait Gallery and an extremely weird codependency.

What develops, when Gordon stumbles into a premature marriage with the daughter of a London cabbie, is a recasting of Ian McEwan’s disquieting ode to creepy Venice, “The Comfort of Strangers,” complete with requisite unexpected bloodshed. But “The Honeymoon” isn’t a mere retread. It’s awfully close to being a peer: a sophisticated take on all the big stuff (love, class, death, Bellinis) whose evanescent prose shimmers like mist rising off the Grand Canal.