FIRST FICTION

Mother of Sorrows

Richard McCann

Pantheon: 196 pp., $20

Richard McCANN published the earliest of these interlinked stories, “My Mother’s Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame,” in 1986. It’s taken him nearly two decades to finish the book, and we might expect the product of such a long gestation to be a little stale -- a compendium of second thoughts. Think again. “Mother of Sorrows” features some of the cleanest, most elegant and unfussy prose I’ve read in ages.

Which isn’t to tar McCann with a minimalist brush. On several occasions he tips his hat to Proust, whose melancholic pursuit of the past he plainly admires: “We sat at the half-cleared table like two deposed aristocrats for whom any word might serve as the switch of a minuterie that briefly lights a long corridor of memory -- so long, in fact, the switch must be pressed repeatedly before they arrive at the door to their room.”

Nor do the Proustian notes end there. Like the hero of “In Search of Lost Time,” McCann’s narrator has something of a Mommy Problem: His relationship to his mother is almost nutty in its devotional ardor. He apes her speech, he tries on her clothes. This doesn’t go down too well in Carroll Knolls -- a suburban stretch of tract houses near Washington, D.C. -- and especially not during the buttoned-up era of coonskin caps and “Leave It to Beaver.” Even worse, the effeminate narrator has a conventional, crowd-pleasing older brother. What better way to throw his shame into high relief?

“Mother of Sorrows” is, on one level, a gay coming-of-age narrative, and as such it ranks among the best (Edmund White’s “A Boy’s Own Story” instantly springs to mind). But the ruling metaphors here are more universal: concealment and disclosure, assertion and invisibility. When, during a bucolic vacation, the narrator’s father checks his body for ticks with a table lamp, he feels catastrophically exposed: “I felt right then as if there were nothing about me that was not visible to him.” The two brothers spend hours assembling the skeleton and viscera of a scale-model Visible Man -- a comical touch with the ring of autobiographical truth. In this sense McCann’s tale has less to do with sexual preference: It’s about the habit of hiding our truest selves in plain sight.

*

Raymond and Hannah

A Love Story

Stephen Marche

Harvest Books: 216 pages, $14 paper

During its initial pages, “Raymond and Hannah” conforms pretty closely to romantic formula: Boy Meets Girl, in this case at a boozy party in Toronto. Raymond and Hannah fall in love and spend an ecstatic, sex-drenched week together. At this point, however, Stephen Marche sets himself an interesting challenge. Hannah departs for Israel, where she’s scheduled to spend nine months studying at an Orthodox yeshiva, and the real suspense kicks in. Can a wandering Jew and her golden goy possibly maintain their passion at a distance of 6,000 miles?

That question will keep most readers turning the pages. Meanwhile, this romance in absentia also functions as a philosophical springboard. The 28-year-old author, an internationally ranked chess player and former competitive fencer, is fascinated by the rift between mind and body. Love sits at the nexus of the two. Yet love itself is no match for the sheer transience of existence, which Marche acknowledges in singsong cadences: “The stuff we call the material world is leaves that go green to turn red and fall off, and stones ground to smooth pebbles to become dust, and our own bodies and the bodies of those we love.”

“Raymond and Hannah” boasts an unusual structural gimmick: small-print notations in the margin, which comment upon the main text. Presumably Marche is alluding to the Talmudic tradition. In any case, he’s wasted his time. The marginalia does nothing but distract from his evocative prose and quirky sense of place. (Hannah’s take on Jerusalem’s Old City: “It’s like living in an allegory where they want to sell you tchotchkes all day.”)

Whether Raymond and Hannah will stick together in the long run is an open question. But even their e-mail correspondence, which dominates the middle of the novel, makes for a gripping read -- as if Abelard and Heloise had finally stumbled into the Internet age.