First novels

Who's afraid of the big bad Guardian/New Republic literary critic James Wood?

I am. And if you're not, I urge you to reconsider your position. English expat Wood is a first-rate writer and a very serious guy; his stringent, moral high-mindedness with regard to fiction elevates the level of public discourse about books, throws down a gauntlet before readers and critics alike, and raises the stakes for literature itself. That's a little scary.

Wood is known for sacred-cow tipping in the pastures of American literature, for tastes that might be construed as conservative, and for being a champion of realism. In the introduction to his collection of essays The Broken Estate, he writes:

The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst .... It is impossible to discuss the power of the novel without discussing the reality that fiction so powerfully discloses, which is why realism ... has been the novel's insistent preoccupation from the beginning of the form ... [I]n all fiction those moments when we are suddenly moved have to do with something we fumblingly call "true" or "real."

But fiction is not reality; even the most direct contemporary realism (as opposed to the traditional realism of the nineteenth century) strives not to be, to represent the real, but to seem real. When we as readers experience the moments of thrall that Wood describes, we are overtaken not by reality, but by verisimilitude. That fumbling sense of the "true" testifies to the writer's skill as a particular and magnificent kind of liar and manipulator; fiction, as Wood says, is "a true lie ... that at any moment it might fail to make its case."

Rarely failing to make its case is Alice Sebold's astonishing debut novel, The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, $21.95). Characterized by the formal simplicity and directness of contemporary realism, the novel wills a gentle suspension of disbelief for her wholly plausible world, which would be merely laudable competence were it not for the fact that this is, in essence, a ghost story. The book's narrator, a fourteenyear-old girl named Susie, has been raped and murdered by a neighbor in her Pennsylvania suburb; she looks on from a personalized heaven as the event takes its slow, accreting toll on her family and friends. With a detached compassion reminiscent of John Cheever, Sebold configures the spheres above and below, and the rules that govern interaction between the two, with marvelous authority. She writes as if there were nothing in what she presents that might defy belief, and so we believe.

This alone, however, cannot account for the authenticity, the intense reality of the world Sebold creates, which is made up of moment upon "true" moment. On the way to a memorial service, Susie's grandmother pinches her own cheeks to give them color, and Susie's little brother imitates her; Susie's father recalls to himself how Susie would fall off the bed in the middle of the night and sleep through the impact, how he would find her on the floor, tangled in the sheets; and Susie herself, in an attempt to make contact with the living, wills a dead geranium to bloom-in heaven, "petals swirled in eddies up to [her] waist. On Earth, nothing happened."

In the novel's final chapters, things take a turn for the mawkish, and the prose loses some of its taut precision, but on the whole The Lovely Bones is an accomplished, mature work, replete with details so ordinary and so singular that they can only be real-except, of course, that they are the author's graceful, original lies.

Disturbance of the Inner Ear(Carroll & Graf, $25), by Joyce Hackett, is neither as assured nor as easily likable as Sebold's novel, but then its project is an altogether different and perhaps more difficult one. The novel's narrator is former musical prodigy Isabel Masurovsky, the daughter of a pianist who survived the Czech concentration camps by performing for his captors. He raised Isabel to be a virtuoso cellist, in the process binding her to the paralyzing horror of his past. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, when her parents were killed in a car accident, Isabel was taken under the wing of an aged mentor. The novel begins ten years later; shortly after their arrival in Italy, the mentor dies, and Isabel is left alone to wrestle free from the long haunting of her past and reclaim her music (she has been unable to perform, and barely able to play, for the past decade).

Hackett thrusts us into Isabel's traumatized consciousness. We encounter the world through a mind that, like some highly sensitive instrument of measure, registers every impression with violent intensity; commonplace sights and events leap upon us with the terrible force of long-held secrets abruptly disclosed.

This consciousness, the novel's fraught atmosphere, and its intentionally arduous quality are conjured with dense, poetic prose. Fog curdles, flames wither, the narrator walks "in rain so hard there was no need to cry," and people linger over conversation "as if time were an infinite mansion waiting to be filled." As is appropriate for a novel with music at its heart, many of its best descriptions are of sound: One man's voice has "a muscular grace," another's "wandered up like a curl of smoke through the floorboards," noises "shear apart the dark," and the notes of a cello are heard as "the sound bursting from my bow's first slice like the flesh of an overripe plum." Some readers may find this a bit histrionic, but Hackett's in good company; her work recalls, by fits and starts, the purple realism of Kundera, Ondaatje, and the pitched near-surreality of Marguerite Duras.

Who's Who in Hell (Grove, $13), on the other hand, is the apotheosis of arch, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth cleverness, in the divine style of Amis the Elder and Waugh's comedies. Author Robert Chalmers possesses great wit and substantial intelligence, which makes it all the more irksome that his potentially fabulous bildungsroman-chronicling the misadventures of a young English obituary writer, his eccentric boss, his true love, her uncharmingly dysfunctional family, and the denizens of a pub called The Owl-does not live up to its potential.

The book, piece by comic set piece, approaches brilliance (I'll read it again just for the bon mots and one-liners) but is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Plot, scarce to begin with, disappears completely about a third of the way through and then reappears with a vengeance in the final stretch-too much, and too late. Amusing as it is, Who's Who reads as if Chalmers lacked a vigilant editor to remind him that editing, sadly impossible in real life, is requisite in fiction; the novel suffers from the inclusion of too much raw, shapeless clay of reality, untouched by the sculpturing and subterfuge that produce the coveted, deceptively simple, resonant semblance of the real.

[Author Affiliation]

Darcy Cosper lives in New York. She is really, truly almost finished with her first novel.