First Fiction

Harbor

Lorraine Adams

Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $23.95

*

Lorraine ADAMS won the Pulitzer Prize for her Washington Post reporting, and her mesmerizing first novel is told with the kind of persuasive detail you associate with top-shelf investigative journalism. It’s also a ripping read: Its narrative sweeps along like a Sunday-night TV drama, and its cast of young Muslim men -- variously drifting toward respectability or roguery -- is drawn with a stylish realism worthy of Zola. And as it traces the progress of Aziz, a 24-year-old Algerian refugee who sails into Boston Harbor as a stowaway in the mid-1990s, “Harbor” reaches conclusions as murky and inhospitable as the cold waters Aziz has braved to start his new life in America.

After 52 delirious days in a tanker’s fetid cargo hold, Aziz swims ashore, embarking on a journey that will take him from the Boston suburbs, where he shares a teeming apartment with the swinging Rafik and a revolving cast of wayward emigres, to Brooklyn, where he lands a job at the Haha Smoke Shop. Along the way, he toils in a Mexican restaurant with the go-getting Ghazi; suffers the earnest pretensions of his brother Mourad, who has won a green-card lottery; and watches as Heather, an all-American girl with a thing for misunderstood Muslim dudes, gives her heart to assorted roommates who work in body shops, fry doughnuts or deliver pizzas. For his part, Aziz is wowed by the concept of a paycheck but suspects that this new frontier might, in fact, be a dead end: “He was not a painter, just someone who scraped or hammered when told. He was not a janitor, only someone who hosed sidewalks or emptied trash. He was a busboy who never made it to waiter. He was someone who raked leaves or watered grass, not a gardener.” The American dream, Aziz realizes, is only for Americans.

Meanwhile, the well-heeled Rafik and the increasingly cynical Ghazi have gotten mixed up in questionable activities involving credit cards and a storage facility. When the feds come circling, Adams expertly orchestrates a mad tangle of circumstance and history that, in willing governmental hands (and earpieces), resembles evidence of a terror cell. As Aziz and his pals, who are more clueless than criminal, are sent off to their fates, “Harbor” becomes a heart-rending cautionary tale of American justice gone awry.

*

Outside Valentine

Liza Ward

Henry Holt: 306 pp., $23

*

“I love you more than Frankie Avalon. I love you more than the whole wide world.” So says 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate to her teen paramour Charlie Starkweather. It’s the late 1950s and what better way to express the mad desperation of puppy love? Throughout “Outside Valentine,” an inventive and probing novel from Liza Ward, this ideal of unabashed, unquestioning ardor winds itself through the entangled lives of assorted Nebraskans as they traverse the passing decades and a largely forbidding emotional landscape.

Caril and Charlie’s love is no run-of-the-mill affair. After all, they’re the real-life duo that went on a murderous rampage in Nebraska in 1958, one of the most notorious sprees in American history. (It was so memorably depicted in Terence Malick’s 1973 film, “Badlands,” that, reading “Outside Valentine,” it’s impossible to get Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen out of your head.) Together, Caril and Charlie form a macabre emotional backdrop as we follow their twisted affair, zero in on a Lincoln teen named Puggy in 1962 and, in 1991, catch up with Lowell Bowman, a New York antiques dealer (whose parents, it turns out, were among Caril and Charlie’s victims).

Ward bounces from one narrative to another, giving us an eerie sense of the way horrible events reverberate down the generations. We learn that Puggy, propelled by a need to connect herself to the murders, grows up to marry the orphaned Lowell. Her loveless girlhood was haunted by images of the killers as romantic fugitives: “I imagined Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate sitting down with their guns propped up against the side of the bench, blood on their shirts ... thinking about all the terrible things they’d done for love.” Of course, choosing sociopaths as emotional role models has its pitfalls, as Ward amply demonstrates in this novel about the seemingly endless half-life of crime.