FIRST FICTION

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The Highest Tide

A Novel

Jim Lynch

Bloomsbury: 250 pp., $23.95

MILES O’MALLEY, the pipsqueak hero of Jim Lynch’s remarkable first novel, describes himself as an “increasingly horny, speed-reading thirteen-year-old insomniac.” All of 4 feet, 8 inches and 78 pounds, he’s also besotted with the writings of ecologist Rachel Carson. Growing up on Skookumchuck Bay in Puget Sound, Miles patrols the chill waters for coonstripe shrimp and sea stars, geoducks and nudibranchs. He can tell you that sea cucumbers have the ability to vomit their own organs and that Arctic fish can sometimes freeze solid and thaw themselves out.

“The Highest Tide” tells of one “freakish summer” in which Miles is “ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.” When he finds a 923-pound giant squid (Architeuthis) washed up on shore, a series of startling discoveries unfolds. The giant squid is followed by an ultra-rare ragfish, a barnacle-covered Japanese street sign and evidence of an invasive crab species threatening Puget Sound. Miles is busy making other discoveries too: He’s falling for Angie Stegner, a bipolar rocker a few years (and drug experiments) his senior, and he’s becoming a media sensation, attracting a veritable tidal wave of reporters to witness the latest findings and to glean wisdom from the tyro Cousteau: “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something,” an obliging Miles tells them, unwittingly setting himself up as a kind of messiah and turning his bay into a destination for New Age freaks.

This is an irresistible coming-of-age fable, dappled with lyricism, briny honesty and good humor. It’s as if Carson herself (or, say, John McPhee) had turned to fiction, bringing an exacting sense of the ebb and flow of nature to the story of one largely unsupervised boy (his parents take a hands-off approach to child-rearing) and the exploration of his surroundings, both marine and human. (In addition to bivalves, crustaceans and fish, Miles hangs around with a cleavage-obsessed, air-guitar-playing sidekick named Kenny Phelps.)

The overarching lesson in “The Highest Tide,” whose title refers to Miles’ prediction of an end-of-summer freak tide that could forever transform Puget Sound, is about the value of paying attention. The weirdness really starts when the attentive Miles becomes the latest specimen in the media aquarium. “Attention changes people,” a friend of Miles’ warns. But, like Skookumchuck Bay’s fluctuating waters, change is inevitable, even for the precocious Miles in his geeky redoubt of marine biology and puppy love.

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The Art of Uncontrolled Flight

A Novel

Kim Ponders

HarperCollins: 184 pp., $19.95

KIM PONDERS, the author of this slender novel that travels from the early ‘70s to the verge of the current Iraq war, is a former Air Force aviator. In “The Art of Uncontrolled Flight,” she charts the veering course of Capt. Annie Viola Shaw, a woman whose life has been spent in one kind of flight or another.

Annie picked up the flight bug from her charismatic father, a pilot with a taste for Alfa Romeos and redheaded secretaries. After her mother perishes in a house fire (a scene rendered with particular horror), Annie comes of age in a variety of ad hoc settings, like so many layovers along the flight plan of her father’s serial monogamy. It’s no wonder that Annie is unmoored, taking to the skies and replicating her father’s flight patterns: a half-hearted marriage (to a well-grounded geologist), an extramarital affair (with a fellow pilot) and tours of duty.

“The Art of Uncontrolled Flight” really takes off when Annie arrives in the Persian Gulf in 1991, sucked into a modern military as rootless as she is. We meet a squadron of “Catch-22”-worthy rogues who bounce from Kuwait to Kandahar, Mogadishu to Kosovo, enduring half-baked politics, embittered officers, bans on their personal Fry Daddies (the better to make chicken wings with) and, in Annie’s case, a harrowing off-course flight in the skies over Iraq.

Through it all, Annie remains alarmingly above the fray, looking down at her life. For this disconnected heroine and her fellow fliers, war has become “just another commute from home, only longer and with guns.”