View from the floor

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Firmin

Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

Sam Savage

Coffee House Press: 152 pp., $14.95 paper

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Rat

Jonathan Burt

Reaktion Books: 190 pp., $19.95 paper

EARLY in Sam Savage’s delightful debut novel, “Firmin,” our eponymous narrator issues the following confession:

“Now, buffeted and stunned by life, I look back at my childhood in the hope of finding there some confirmation of my worth, some sign that I was destined at least for a time to be something other than a dilettante and a buffoon, that I was defeated by inexorable circumstance and not by a flaw within.”

It’s a lovely passage, full of the eloquent yearning we have come to expect from our finest bildungsromans, and it is made no less so by the fact that our speaker is vermin. A rat, to be specific.

Firmin is a hero in the Dickensian mode: a runty, introspective underdog forced to make his way in the cruel world, played here by the never quite savory and now extinct Scollay Square of Boston.

Born to a “tosspot” mother in the basement of a rundown bookstore, he is bullied from the teat by his siblings and driven to seek sustenance by nibbling on the nearby texts: “I must have put away whole chapters by the time I was old enough to toddle on wobbly fours out of our dark corner and into the flickering bigness.”

His bibliophily is flagrant, compulsive and perfectly hilarious. Before long, Firmin is communing with all the Big Ones, as well as including them in his diet: “Dostoyevsky and Strindberg, for example. In them I was quick to recognize fellow sufferers, hysterics like me.” The only literature he won’t abide is the rodential variety. “I despise good-natured Ratty in ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ ” he sneers. And don’t even ask what he thinks of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Thanks to regular sojourns to the local adult movie house, our hero goes on to become something of a porn aficionado.

That furious scratching sound you hear is a Disney exec crossing “Firmin” off her list of books to be optioned.

Savage is having a grand time here. His style is lyric and conversational, with the sardonic shadings of Vonnegut, and the same explicit tenderness. In Firmin, he has found a figure of irresistible pathos, an outcast from his own species whose gnawing desire is simply to share his imaginative capacities with the human world. Instead, he gets beaten and poisoned for his efforts.

Lonely Firmin finds refuge in his heroes, a list that runs willy-nilly from Blake and Joyce to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to Milt Jackson. “In the end,” Firmin announces, “I would rather be Cole Porter than God.”

Alas, he suffers one setback after another. His bookstore closes. His sole protector, an obscure science fiction writer named Jerry Magoon, perishes. Inevitably, the city moves forward with plans to raze Scollay Square. “I sometimes passed in my wanderings whole standing buildings with their facades torn off, all the rooms standing open to the air, some with the furniture still in them and wallpaper on the walls and bathrooms complete with a sink and toilet,” Firmin observes. “They looked like enormous dollhouses.”

Savage -- at 65, a first-time novelist -- has captured the essential tragedy of a world in which the artistic impulse kneels before the bulldozer. But he has also granted his narrator a dignified end.

As Firmin prepares to make his final exit, the ghost of Ginger Rogers arrives to him in a vision: “I closed my eyes and imagined we were flying over the city and all the people in the streets were looking up and pointing. They had never seen anything like it, a naked angel carrying a rat.”

His mind turns, at last, to “Finnegans Wake,” the very masterpiece on which he cut his teeth as a reader and eater. “Dry and cold was the world,” he concludes, “and beautiful the words.” A fitting coda to this brief, moving and wildly inventive novel.

If you’re looking for a companion volume to “Firmin,” you could hardly do better than “Rat,” a wonderfully obsessive nonfiction survey of the species that has been called “the shadow of man.”

Written in meticulous prose by British writer Jonathan Burt, the book is brimming with gorgeous illustrations and tantalizing zoological tidbits. Did you know, for instance, that the bite of the brown rat can exert up to 7,000 pounds of pressure per square inch? Or that a sudden proliferation of rats nearly destroyed the settlement at Jamestown, Va.?

“Rat” is most compelling when it explores the psychological significance of its subject. This includes a rich literary tradition that dates back to Bourdon de Sigrais’ “Histoire des Rats,” published in 1783. Fans of Orwell will recall the pivotal role the rodent plays in his masterpiece, “1984,” though they may not know that the author suffered a lifelong terror. In the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, he was more frightened of rats than bullets.

In fact, these animals have long been regarded as phobic objects, “the visible embodiment of the filth that society was placing out of sight” in sewers.

Burt takes this a step further. “The rat imitates the human’s own prodigious appetite and is, like an anti-system, the embodiment of a drive to consume and nothing more,” he notes. It is the superabundance of our current era, after all, that sustains the rat.

Fortunately, Burt has the good sense to acknowledge the rat’s paradoxical roles as a bearer of plague and as a vital instrument in scientific research, as a symbol of revulsion and also of beauty, particularly among the odd sect of fanciers who own breeds such as the Russian Blue and the Argente Cream.

The author even manages to offer an unintended tip of the cap to Firmin. “The lascivious, greedy and cannibalistic rat,” he argues, “a stalwart harbourer of a good swatch of the Seven Deadly Sins, is also extremely smart, adaptable and even, for some writers, beautiful.”

Take that, Mickey. *