FIRST FICTION

Unkempt

Stories

Courtney Eldridge

Harcourt: 262 pp., $23

In “Summer of Mopeds,” the fourth entry in this collection of seven stories and a novella, an unnamed woman wakes up, showers, visits her shrink and then heads over to her accountant’s office. She also cries at some point. It’s utterly, almost defiantly, quotidian stuff.

But, like so much of this riveting and inventive debut from Courtney Eldridge, “Summer of Mopeds” isn’t quite what it seems. Eldridge’s story unfolds in a series of unapologetic false starts: “Say there’s this woman whose accountant makes her cry,” she begins. She goes on to tell this ostensibly simple tale over and over, each time adding details, doubling back with disclosures. The result is an enveloping journey, with Eldridge, like an ever-present mischievous sprite, watching over her heroine’s twisting path from denial to a gruesome recovered memory.

Eldridge’s stories are forever at play in their own fantastical surfaces. She is an unabashed entertainer, unafraid of ploys, gimmicks and whimsy. But just when you’ve adjusted to her oddball narrative scenery, she sucks you into a looking-glass realm of emotional-confidence games, petty anxieties and heartbreak. Take, for instance, “Sharks,” which relates a conversation between two girlfriends, one of whom is convinced that a shark could devour her in a public pool. “Becky” transcribes a series of increasingly needy answering machine messages from a serial dieter who turns out to be as obese emotionally as she is physically. The title story is the best of the bunch and perhaps the most conventional, probing as it does the endless missed signals between a bottled-up mother and her cruel, overeducated daughter.

Eldridge finishes out the collection in outlandish form: “The Former World Record Holder Settles Down” is a novella about a recovering porn actress (the “world record” in question alludes to the number of men -- 197 -- that she had sex with at one time) who loves to bowl and obsesses over former New York Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer. Eldridge’s thoroughly modern fables are as hilariously self-involved as the women who populate them.

*

Tall Island

Bill Powers

BlackBooks: 216 pp., $18 paper

Bill POWERS is the former honcho of BlackBook magazine, a big, glossy gazetteer of Manhattan glitz, and his first novel, a slim, comedic romp that roams uptown and downtown and even deigns to enter the outer boroughs, could easily be a vest-pocket guide of the kind that BlackBook would be proud to publish: brimming with gossip, stocked with high-priced goods, splattered with bold-faced names and turbocharged with envy, lust and power. In sum, it’s good larky fun, propelled by snobbery, booze, corporate scumbaggery and a trio of cubicle jockeys toiling at the fashionably frayed edges of New York glamour.

The three of them -- Carter, Jason and Jane -- work at a fictional Conde Nast publication called Hudson, a sort of Vanity Fair for the slacker set that, this being publishing, is in the midst of being dumbed-down. Carter is an admitted hack, both in his career and in life, now free to explore his personal ineptitude since being given the boot by his lawyer girlfriend. Jason, that rare journalist who cultivates six-pack abs, gets himself mixed up with the notorious zillionaire Randall Hackenlooper and becomes his official biographer and mascot. And fashion editor Jane is reeling from her breakup with an infamous jerk of a photographer, perfect timing for her to get sent out on a stomach-turning assignment to cover a staged orgy that, in Powers’ hands, turns into a surreal metaphor of New York.

Powers rakes his terminally disaffected and eternally star-struck cast over the coals, portraying Manhattan as a thread-count- and celebrity-obsessed ghetto of “the insta riche.” There are cameos of Jay McInerney, Olatz Schnabel, Ron Jeremy and Candace Bushnell, “the Connecticut sex-cat who’d spun a New York Observer column into HBO gold” and no end of product placements. Of course, Powers is clever enough to realize that he and his Conde Nasties all secretly (or not so secretly) love everything they profess to loathe. As the braying chief editor of Hudson tells his terrified staff, “We’re not telling stories here; we’re selling lust, envy, lifestyle.”