First Fiction

The Ha-Ha

Dave King

Little, Brown: 342 pp., $23.95

Howard Kapostash is the addled, tortured and altogether winning hero of Dave King’s probing novel, a saga of the American self that addresses the shape of modern family life, the lingering wounds of the Vietnam War and one man’s efforts to cope with permanent damage to his left temporal lobe. Howard -- who received his brain injury in Vietnam -- isn’t rendered alone in the world by such time-honored literary causes as ennui or fate, but, like the tattooed protagonist of the 2000 film “Memento” who battled short-term memory loss, he’s laid low by dysfunction: anomia, an inability to recall the names of objects, which manifests as an inability to speak or read.

The disconnect between Howard’s flair for observation and his difficulty in expressing himself generates no end of heartbreak and beauty. The “ha-ha” of the title refers to an obscure feature of landscape architecture, popularized by the great 18th century practitioner Capability Brown: a barrier, or trough, hidden by the surrounding ground. It’s an obtuse concept, but one that serves King -- and Howard -- well. As Howard spends his days mowing and weed-whacking around the grounds of a stony old convent in the Midwestern town where he lives, he continually fixates upon the convent’s ha-ha, thrilled by the illusion of it, the invisible, unbreakable border between one green space and another.

Of course, it’s a metaphor for Howard’s own state: Despite the rippling scar across his forehead (which might, itself, resemble a ha-ha), Howard’s appearance is otherwise normal. But Howard yearns for a down-deep kind of normalcy, one that frees him from the pressure of “being an exemplar of the admirably rebuilt life.” When his old high school sweetheart, Sylvia, enters rehab to beat a cocaine habit, she gives Howard temporary guardianship over Ryan, her 9-year-old son. The ensuing adventure in child care shows Howard coming back into the world, as a temporary parent for a boy who, like himself, is full of silences, prone to tantrums and nagged by questions of identity. (Ryan’s absentee dad is African American.)

A father figure who does not speak: Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “The Ha-Ha” is an elaborate meditation on that classic familial trope, with Howard cast as the dad who’s not given to small talk and Ryan as the son who begrudgingly clings to him. As ornate as Howard’s dysfunction is, in the end, he is, to King’s great credit, bracingly like all of us: “I’m doing the very best I can, and some things just go unexplained.”

*

Sightseeing

Stories

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Grove Press: 250 pp., $19.95

In the title story of Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s brilliant collection, a Thai teenager reflects on his mother’s tart observation that “Thailand was only a paradise for fools and farangs, for criminals and foreigners.” Farangs are tourists, visitors, strangers -- the mostly American interlopers who show up amid the fools and criminals who populate Lapcharoensap’s mischievous tales of modern Thailand, looking, as another mother puts it in “Farangs,” for elephants and a term for sex that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

Beneath the feet and bicycle tires of Lapcharoensap’s young Thais lie the perilously shifting tectonics of old traditions and encroaching globalization. Again, in “Farangs,” the half-American son of a Thai motel owner lusts after an American tourist girl, wooing her with elephant rides and such disarming observations as “Mister Eastwood is a first-class thespian.” (Clint Eastwood just happens to be the name of his pet pig.) “Priscilla the Cambodian” tells of the improbable friendship between two boys given to vandalism and a Cambodian refugee girl named after Elvis Presley’s wife.

And in the perfect novella “Cockfighter,” a girl named Ladda finds her daughterly admiration challenged when her proud father -- an expert cockfighter and inveterate gambler -- gets himself in the sights of Little Jui, a thug determined to bring him down. While Ladda and her mom spend their days stitching bras for a lingerie manufacturer, her father loses all to Little Jui’s jumbo Filipino fighting cocks and his attendant goons. It’s a stirring coming-of-age fable, brimming, like most of “Sightseeing,” with sharp-clawed survival lessons.