FIRST FICTION

Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon

Dean Bakopoulos

Harcourt: 288 pp., $23

Dean BAKOPOULOS’ novel begins with a single stroke of magical realism: In the spring of 1991, all the fathers in the working-class Detroit suburb Maple Rock simply disappear. The rumor, or communal fantasy, is that these middle-aged family men have decamped to the moon.

“We imagined the climate of the moon to be temperate,” muses the narrator, Michael Smolij, “and we imagined our fathers singing songs in praise of the lives they had there.” Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? Yet this fantastic flight to the lunar version of Club Med has uglier implications for the wives, sons and daughters left behind. And it drives home the fact that Maple Rock is very much a sinking ship.

What do you do when your father vanishes? You try, however ineptly, to fill his shoes. Michael, who’s 16 at the time, wades into a precocious regimen of booze, sex and bare-knuckle brawling. At Christmas, other manly chores prove harder to master: “We roasted turkeys and learned how to carve them alone. Ours ended up in ugly chunks, like a carcass ripped apart by dogs.”

This shift from fantasy to blue-collar realism is only one of the surprises on offer. Another is the sheer span of the book, which crams more than a decade into fewer than 300 pages. Michael grows up, graduates from high school and settles into minimum-wage limbo at the Maple Rock Mall. Relationships come and go, allowing him to try on the roles of surrogate husband and father. Eventually, he claws his way up the ladder to a job as a writer at a radio station: a self-made man.

It would be a mistake, however, to view Michael’s story as a paean to upward mobility. (In Maple Rock, the American Dream is on its last, wobbly legs.) It would also be a mistake to pin down the precise meaning of this memorable novel’s paternal exodus. Sociological statement? Personal nightmare? Bakopoulos is juggling both at once, and that gives “Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon” much of its gentle, persuasive power.

*

Stop That Girl

Elizabeth McKenzie

Random House: 256 pp., $22.95

Billed by the publisher as “A Novel in Stories,” Elizabeth McKenzie’s debut is no such thing. True, several of the chapters can stand on their own, having been nipped and tucked into a state of completion. What “Stop That Girl” most resembles, however, is a bildungsroman with a gaping hole in it. We follow the young protagonist through childhood, adolescence, her teens -- and suddenly Ann Ransom is an adult, having vanished beneath the radar for several key years. It’s as if Holden Caulfield reappeared at the end of “The Catcher in the Rye” as an alcoholic single father occupying a double-wide trailer somewhere in Florida.

Yet McKenzie’s take on childhood is so smart, funny and fiercely observant that we hardly mind. Ann is the product of a dysfunctional household -- an absent father, a depressed mother -- and she spends much of the book fleeing the ministrations of her family. (Stop that girl!) Luckily, the arrival of a kind stepfather and a baby sister have a stabilizing effect. Life settles down into a Californian version of normality. Still, Ann worries that there is “no one in the world who would ever understand my version of things.”

Part of what makes her story so engaging is that she isn’t a rebel, an outcast, a magical changeling. She doesn’t have the frantic yen for self-transformation. “I expected things to get better,” Ann confesses at a certain point. “Without realizing it at the time, I subscribed heartily to delayed gratification.” In the current climate of American fiction, this might be the most shocking admission any character could make. Devil worship would go down much easier.

The other reason we continue reading, and skate right around that large hole in the narrative ice, is that McKenzie keeps delivering such delicious paragraphs: “Never before had anyone discussed the possibility of my own death with me,” the teenage Ann recalls. “It felt intimate and indifferent at the same time. As if someone had stripped me of my clothes but not stopped to look. A real insult.” This gets the youthful intimation of mortality down to perfection. Now, can we look forward to “Ann Ransom: The Missing Years”?