FIRST FICTION

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Indecision

A Novel

Benjamin Kunkel

Random House: 248 pp., $21.95

DWIGHT B. Wilmerding, the 28-year-old recovering philosophy major and narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s heady debut novel, has a way with emotional instability, romantic confusion, general directionlessness and the kind of oddball phraseology that can stop a reader dead in his tracks. Dwight on chronic underachievement: “The real thing about mediocrity is you’re misunderstood even worse than a genius.” On a side of nature that Emerson never talked about: “There is nowhere to sit down, and you have no stereo to listen to.” On intense male-female interactions: “Things were maybe getting cheesy. But at least they possessed the dignity of taking place.”

Kunkel writes with such fluent nonchalance (and anyone who’s ever been 28 will be seduced by Dwight’s post-collegiate Sturm und Drang) that you nearly miss the fact that things do, in fact, take place in “Indecision.” If the plot feels like an afterthought (the novel’s structure isn’t nearly so shapely as the author’s voice, but who cares?), it does journey to unexpected climes.

Dwight, canned from his boring New York tech position at Pfizer (“Wow. Pfired!”) and attempting to cure his abulia (a psychological condition marked by indecision) with an experimental medication known as Abulinix, flies to Ecuador to track down Natasha, a long-lost prep-school lust object.

But when Dwight lands, he finds that Natasha has decamped, leaving him to explore the Amazon with a politically engaged half-Belgian, halfArgentine grad-school dropout (and beauty) named Brigid Lerman. (“Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome,” Dwight muses.) Together, the two of them manage -- with the help of a potent local hallucinogen and the guidance of a Haponi tribesman named Edwin -- to overcome Dwight’s fear of spiders, dread of commitment and reliance on coin tosses to settle life’s big questions. There’s intense, prelapsarian-style jungle sex too.

What often makes “Indecision” itself indecisive -- those pointy-headed tangents on globalization, erotic transference and Teutonic philosophy -- is precisely what makes this wise and clownish enterprise work so well. By the end, our Abulinix- and Brigid-fueled hero finds the power to embrace democratic socialism (wait, isn’t that having it both ways?), to establish long distance relations with Brigid (commitment phobia both thwarted and indulged!) and to deliver a majestically disordered public address (at his 10-year high-school reunion; talk about regression). To our relief, this amusing narrator has come out of his Amazonian conversion experience in much the same shape as when he went in, becoming, thanks to Kunkel, a poster boy for the underestimated glories of inertia.

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Karoo Boy

A Novel

Troy Blacklaws

Harvest Books: 200 pp., $13 paper

IN Troy Blacklaws’ lyrical novella, a 14-year-old white South African boy named Douglas witnesses a freak accident that forever alters his family: His twin brother, Marsden, is accidentally struck -- and killed -- by a high-arcing bowl from their father, a journalist, in a friendly cricket match.

“For me, the world has become a slow, dull turning under the sun,” Douglas tells us in the wake of Marsden’s death. “My father’s typewriter gathers dust. Marsden’s room is a museum of unfingered things.” Douglas’ father soon moves out and his distraught mother packs the two of them up to leave the “unafrican Africa” of Cape Town for the remote desert “backveld” of Karoo.

Here, Douglas encounters a troubled realm of racist Afrikaners and violent, restive blacks. (The story is set in the apartheid days of the 1970s.) Where Edenic Cape Town was all about barbecues on the beach, Karoo is all about designations, limits and conflicts: Douglas’ rapport with a black gas-station attendant recalls the subversive friendship that Huck struck up with Jim. And Douglas’ ardor for a Boer girl is transformed into horror by her gun-happy father. “It seems unfair,” Douglas reflects, “in a world of hard balls and sharks and lynxes, to expect me to outfoot all the dangers fate throws my way.” But, like South Africa, Douglas (in this seductive tale), survives to see better days.