First Fiction

The Little White Car

Danuta de Rhodes

Canongate: 262 pp., $21

*

The little white car that stars in this joy ride of a first novel is a Fiat Uno, Europe’s ubiquitous subcompact. It’s no surprise, then, that this mischievous tale of a 22-year-old Parisian slacker named Veronique and her diminutive automobile strives to be every bit as cute and funky as the Uno itself.

As a shaggy car story, Veronique’s Uno isn’t quite Herbie the Love Bug, nor is it Christine. In fact, the car remains hilariously inert, with all manner of zaniness swirling around it. The unassuming vehicle hides out in a garage while Veronique and her assorted hipster pals dismantle it -- one seat, gadget and indicator light and stray hard candy at a time. It’s the summer of 1997 and Princess Diana has just perished in the Pont d’Alma tunnel, perhaps after getting cut off by a mysterious little white car -- a Fiat Uno, the authorities say. Through the fog of a hangover, Veronique vaguely recalls having barreled through the tunnel the night before: “I had the radio on -- it was David Bowie singing ‘Heroes’ -- so the crash didn’t seem as loud as it must have been in real life.”

For the precocious Veronique, “real life” barely punctures her bubble. She’s a seen-it-all Bright Young Thing: a promising photographer, occasional clubber, casual drug user. Her stoner beau, Jean-Pierre, digs the heady sounds of the Sofia Experimental Bread Octet while secretly cranking out heavy-metal power ballads. Her best friend, Estelle, dabbles in anorexia and heroin. Veronique resides in an overstimulated realm of spoiled, sexually ambitious urban youth, where there’s absolutely nothing -- tons of it, actually -- happening all the time.

Danuta de Rhodes, the 24-year-old globe-trotting author, crams this unabashedly slight fable with groovy details worthy of those ‘80s New Wave French mysteries by Delacorta (“Diva”). But hold on a second. The spin meisters at Canongate might not want you to know this, but Mlle. Rhodes is, in fact, British novelist Dan Rhodes. He bears scant resemblance to the prodigy of the back-flap bio, who is said to have written screenplays, composed ballet music, designed shoes and studied medieval lit.

Parody of airhead novelists? Englishman cowering behind the persona of a French girl in order to write about Princess Di? Pointless japery? Gleeful misogyny? It’s impossible to know just what Rhodes is up to, but “The Little White Car” is perhaps more amusing than any highfalutin designs -- or the savage parody of harmless chick lit -- that Rhodes may or may not have had in mind.

*

Change Baby

June Spence

Riverhead: 232 pp., $23.95

*

“Genetics is just curse gussied up by science,” says Avie Goss, the wayward heroine of June Spence’s probing novel about the myths that make an American family. Avie has a way of tossing out observations that are as unvarnished as they are intoxicatingly self-incriminating, and in “Change Baby” (the title refers to Avie, born to a mother on the brink of menopause), basic statements of fact have multiple meanings and official histories bear only a glancing resemblance to reality.

Eternally ambivalent, a walking identity crisis, born a generation after her siblings (ne’er-do-well sister Dahlia and absentee brother William), Avie inhabits an ersatz world of her own dubious making: living in Ohio as a kept woman, far from the family seat of Regina, N.C. It is to Regina, a New Southern bedroom community laced with tobacco fields, that Avie returns, reluctantly, when her aging mother, Mabry, nearly burns down the family house.

Avie finds herself caring for a crotchety old lady who is suspiciously more grandmotherly than motherly. The relationship becomes increasingly questionable when we meet neighbor Zephra Overbey, a sharecropper who long ago had shacked up with Avie’s father when Mabry inexplicably fled Regina decades before, taking a breather from motherhood.

What follows, as narrated by Avie, Mabry and Zephra, is a thicket of connections, betrayals and a down-home menage a trois whose consequences echo down the generations. Who begat whom? Where (and with whom) does Avie belong? And, in the end, who exactly is she? This is an achy story of homecoming in which home isn’t at all what it seems. *