First time's the charm: seriously good debut novels

Ah, summertime. The lounging months of leisure, beaches, sunhats, and, of course, the annual release of a batch of first novels. While beach reading is normally limited to light fare, why not take a different literary tack this summer and try these serious -- but tremendous -- debuts.

REVIEWS BY MARK LUCE

Heartbreak in the heartland

Bruce Springsteen's album "Nebraska" evokes the spare spirit of the Midwest perhaps better than anything in American music. Terence Malik's haunting Badlands does the same thing in American cinema. Now, Goodnight, Nebraska, a phenomenal debut novel by Tom McNeal, accomplishes in literature what The Boss and Malik did for the Great Plains in other forms.

Randall Hunsacker didn't want to come to the hamlet of Goodnight, Nebraska. The arrival of the 17-year-old was forced after his involvement in a shooting, a car theft, and the twisted steel carnage of a subsequent crash in Utah. Now Randall is an outsider in a town where whispers, a stubborn resistance to change, and something dangerous simmers beneath rigid appearances.

Randall falls for Marcy Lockhardt, the high-school's most pristine and promising student, and she falls for Randall's mysterious past and quiet introspection. Despite their desire to escape the drudgery of Goodnight, they are sucked even deeper into the strange town by marriage and lost ambition.

Randall and Marcy's tumultuous marriage is punctuated by silence and indifference. Much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, McNeal seamlessly weaves their story with intense, sometimes graphic tales of the other townspeople. These interlocking stories chronicle the unknowingly unhappy, and the vulgar that underpins what for all appearances is simple, bucolic. McNeal's incredibly cinematic descriptions tellingly dramatize the slow, dull aches of hearts stuck in muddy, rutted roads of emotion.

McNeal writes with a quiet intensity, and his scenes of domestic heartbreak and terror happen in the middle of paragraphs. Affairs happen, friendships fail, marriages fray, and people die in strange, violent ways. This is a day in the life. All this simply occurs. Without warning. Without headlines.

Like the later stories of Raymond Carver, Goodnight, Nebraska demonstrates that under the callused hands and hearts lies a soft-beating hope -- the chance for reconciliation and acceptance. McNeal has written an uncommonly human novel; he describes a landscape where, however briefly, the numbness disappears and things as insignificant as interlocked hands, a simple statement, or even a drive on dirt roads means something larger, the promise of something better.


The depths of despair

Philip Shumway is only 13 years old when his older brother disappears. Stepping out to explore Baker's Bottoms Pond near his rural Massachusetts home, the child prodigy vanishes without a trace.

Frederick Reiken's The Odd Sea chronicles the decade following the disappearance, examining how the event affects an already dysfunctional family. The heroic father throws himself into the chisels of timber framing. The angry mother loses herself for months in a psychiatric hospital and Victorian novels. Amy, the oldest sister, screams at the family to move on and steals Ethan's diary to keep them from trying to hang on to what doesn't exist. All the while, Philip, the narrator of this touching story, wanders the woods "not-finding" Ethan.

Reiken remarkably captures the unresolved nature of a disappearance, the world of questions, false leads, and dashed hopes. At times various family members convince themselves that Ethan has been brutally murdered or has run away to Arles, France, to follow in the footsteps of Van Gogh. While everyone crafts their own personal grief crutches, it is Philip who creatively employs his desire to remember his brother with his own budding artistry. Philip walks the woods and backroads scribbling vignettes in bulging notebooks, attempting to "remember everything" about Ethan. He grows to realize these stories won't bring his brother back, but they will bring him out of the nothingness he is so rightly afraid of.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, the story could easily dissolve into emotional schlock, but Reiken's voice is pitch-perfect -- fragile, yet resolute, sad, but celebratory. He renders the family's torment in all its complexity, depicting grieving not as a linear process that can be broken into 12 simple steps, but rather as a disparate mixture of melancholy, sureness, and confusion that defies timelines and the cliched words of experts.

Much like Ordinary People, The Odd Sea strikes with its understated lyricism and surprises with its maturity. Reiken is only in his twenties but writes with the confidence of an author three times his age; someone this young isn't supposed to write something this good.


That'll eat!

    1 loaf of wry
    2 cups of longing
    3 cups of detailed observation
    2 flank steaks of conviction
    Dash of critique of carnivorous colonialism

Stir the wry, longing, and observation in a large mixing bowl. Pour atop flanks and cook for 364 pages. Garnish with critique. Beautifully serves one. Such a literary recipe takes the utmost care, patience, and preparation. Many first-time novel chefs manage to overcook, but Ruth Ozeki is the rare cook -- she creates a sumptuous 12-chapter meal in her debut My Year of Meats.

Jane Little-Takagi reluctantly takes a job with My American Wife!, a TV show that brings the values and meats of the American heartland into the homes of Japanese wives. Jane considers herself a "cultural pimp" for hawking beef for a national lobby association, but as a sometimes brash, sometimes tender fledgling documentarian, she wants the experience, and she needs the money.

Across the Pacific, Akiko Ueno watches My American Wife! and dutifully makes the dishes for her husband, John, one of the producers of the show. But Akiko's inability to conceive causes John shame, which he takes out by beating his quiet wife. However, the strength of Jane's programs, which invariably veer from what the producers are looking for (one of her shows features vegetarian lesbians), gives Akiko hope to remove herself from an increasingly hellish existence.

From the Wal-Martification of America to the hormone-fueled production of meats, Ozeki balances humor with horror, sardonic cultural comment with passionate evocations of the political, personal, and chemical politics of childbearing. Smart, sensitive, slick, and sizzling, My Year of Meats, possesses an edgy hipness informed by maturing convictions, and Ozeki's recipe simmers equal parts attitude and talent.


Mark Luce is a writer who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

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