First Fiction

The Society of Others

A Novel

William Nicholson

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 240 pp., $23.95

Most writers would give their eyeteeth for a resume like William Nicholson’s. The multitalented Brit has produced award-winning children’s books and a slew of celebrated plays, as well as earning two Oscar nominations for his film scripts (which include the stylish “Gladiator” and the wince-making “Nell”).

Only now, however, has the 57-year-old author tried his hand at grown-up fiction. And “The Society of Others” is something unusual: a dromedary-shaped novel, which peaks in the middle and drops off at both ends.

The narrator -- a twentysomething brat barricaded in his suburban bedroom -- gets things off to a shaky start. When he’s not pouting about his middle-class existence, he’s stringing together poetic cliches: “On this random day from all that time ago, longer ago than yesterday, I’m sitting alone in my room, the blind down over the window and the door locked.”

But hang on: The nameless narrator is about to hit the road. And once he ends up in an equally nameless Eastern European backwater, Nicholson’s storytelling instincts kick into higher gear. In no time at all, the bewildered narrator is enmeshed in a lethal tug of war between a popular insurgency and the jackbooted minions of the state. He may or may not have committed a murder. He may or may not have betrayed his friends. Clearly, he is a pawn in somebody’s game -- perhaps in several games at once.

At first the terrain, and the sinister tinge of absurdity, suggest Kafka Lite. But Nicholson’s efficient, no-frills prose reads more like a screenplay; a better comparison would probably be Hitchcock’s film “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” In any case, the whole story falls apart at the end, with a finale set in an ancient castle (hello, Kafka!) and mounds of philosophical mush. Luckily, one valid point emerges from the wreckage. Our best defense against vanity and solipsism is old-fashioned conversation, “one of the few gates into the society of others.” Or to put it another way: Heaven, not hell, is other people.

*

Give Me

Songs for Lovers

Irina Denezhkina

Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

Simon & Schuster: 224 pp., $19.95

At 24, Irina Denezhkina looks to be the It Girl of contemporary Russian letters. She was first discovered nearly three years ago, when she contributed some stories to an obscure webzine, and since then her debut, “Give Me,” has made a splash both at home and abroad. The collection has finally reached America in a fluent, funny translation. Is it worth all the fuss?

For the most part, yes. Denezhkina’s voice is gritty, sometimes graphic. When it comes to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (and there’s plenty of the latter, complete with dopey lyrics), she seldom pulls a punch. Yet she also manages small feats of figurative magic. A typical character has “transparent ears that looked like baby’s hands set on the sides of his head.” Even the weather displays an almost Nabokovian friskiness: “Outside the window the rain was pouring down gaily and the trees were swaying their branches in confusion under the bombardment.”

What “Give Me” lacks is maturity -- and range. The author was still a teenager when she began these stories and many are essentially elongated riffs on puppy love (and lust). There are exceptions: “Valerochka,” one of the highlights, is set in a ferociously Hobbesian version of summer camp. But most of the tales revolve around the mating habits of older boys and girls, who seem to follow the same rules of attraction as their U.S. counterparts.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We no longer expect to open a Russian novel and find the characters musing over tractor production and the Five-Year Plan. Still, what’s fascinating about Denezhkina’s slackers is their paradoxical familiarity. They talk about “the Beatles and Hands Up!, about Pelevin and Tokareva, about the Internet, about dogs, sex, space, ... about their relatives and vodka.... “ Substitute Dave Eggers for Viktor Pelevin, beer for vodka, and they could be in Minneapolis. Come to think of it, even with the vodka they could be in Minneapolis.