FIRST FICTION

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Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

A Novel

Lisa Wixon

Rayo/HarperCollins: 248 pp., $23.95

Growing out of a semi-autobiographical sex-tourism tell-all from Salon.com, “Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban,” by Lisa Wixon, is an eye-opening portrait of contemporary Havana, a place where billboards are plastered with “doe-eyed guerrillas” instead of Nike swooshes, where once-opulent architecture crumbles, and where one Alysia Briggs -- upper-middle class, promising diplomatic career, solid WASP family -- has come to look for her long-lost biological father.

When Alysia’s cash is promptly stolen, she tumbles into Cuba’s thriving underground economy: She becomes a jinetera (“jockey”), one of the countless Cuban women -- and men -- with no option but to become prostitutes to rich foreigners (yumas). The culture of the jinetera, it turns out, is a proud one. Alysia’s best friend, protector and fellow jinetera, for instance, is the brilliant Camila, who happens to be the head of cardiology at Havana’s Instituto de Cardiovascular. As Alysia herself puts it: “I’ve reluctantly joined the ranks of the Cuban demimonde. Educated. Professional. Hopeful. And part-time hookers.” (This is a country, according to Alysia, where biochemists make $13 a month and roach poison is $6 a bottle.)

When she’s not pounding Havana’s pavement searching for her father, Alysia entertains an array of yumas, including a Moroccan businessman who insists that she impersonate a Muslim virgin, and a newly minted Russian capitalist obsessed with Helmut Lang and Cartier. “[I]f the revolution promised progress for women,” Alysia tells us in one of the book’s many piquant political asides, “it’s been fulfilled in ways few would have predicted.” In the midst of this sex-for-hire rogues gallery, Alysia tries to find the one guy she’s really after but can’t manage to connect with: Jose Antonio, her elusive father.

This is a bracing tale -- told with humor and welcome frankness, both political and sexual -- of how duplicitous compromise and single-minded determination can be one and the same; of how Cuba’s rotten system and America’s hard-headed embargo have conspired to create generations of misery; and of how one half-Cuban woman will stop at nothing to be whole.

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Tenney’s Landing

Stories

Catherine Tudish

Scribner: 274 pp., $24

In these appealingly melancholic stories, Catherine Tudish navigates the shoals and eddies of a tiny river town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Tenney’s Landing, as it’s called, was founded by Lucius Tenney (known as Big Hat for his habit of wearing an entire beaver, extremities and all, on his head). In 1765, Tenney washed up on a sandy bend of the Monongahela and never bothered to leave.

That same spirit -- that curiously American entanglement of transience and permanence -- suffuses this collection, each episode of which is set in modern-day Tenney’s Landing. It’s a place where farmers and deer hunters bump up against college professors and the occasional young reporter. Coexisting in this rural outpost, all of them have traded the glory of making it in, say, Chicago or Pittsburgh for the often distressingly ephemeral comforts of tradition and bucolic charm.

In “Where the Devil Lost His Blanket,” proud resident Elizabeth Tenney (descended from Lucius via marriage), finds an unanticipated realm of luxury and romance when she accompanies her late friend Margaria’s ashes back to the woman’s ancestral home in Colombia, a sprawling ranch full of aristocrats.

“The Dowry” tells the chilling details of how a childhood rock-throwing incident compelled one Tenney’s Landing girl to strike out for the plains of South Dakota, never to return. In “Dog Stories,” an 11-year-old ponders her family’s fate after her dad runs off with one of his students and her mom -- once a promising opera singer -- considers the tender advances of a hard-luck handyman.

With its decades-long grudges, rancorous divorces, accidental-shooting deaths and boarded-up movie theater, Tenney’s Landing, Pa., is a hauntingly updated Winesburg, Ohio: a dying American town that, as one narrator insists, “has life in it yet.”