First Fiction

SUSPENSION

By Richard E. Crabbe

St. Martin’s / Thomas Dunne:

436 pp., $27.95

If Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” was an ode to late 19th-century psychoanalysis dressed up as a schlock thriller, then Richard E. Crabbe’s “Suspension,” which bears a superficial resemblance to Carr’s opus, pulls back from the criminal mind to offer panoramic views of the consequences of history. It’s 1883, and the Brooklyn Bridge is nearing completion when the body of a bridge worker named Bucklin is found behind a rough-and-tumble Irish bar. Enter Tom Braddock, a strapping kung fu-fighting detective in New York’s rampantly corrupt police department. Braddock is a Union vet, and despite the great bridge to the future being built across the East River, constant reminders of the Civil War--20 years gone--still hang over the citizenry, most notably over a motley band of conspirators: disgruntled ex-Confederates who have infiltrated the bridge crew. As Tom investigates Bucklin’s murder, we follow him through the grimy, gaslit streets of old New York as he visits his sweetheart, a madame with the requisite heart of gold; takes a kindly interest in Bucklin’s urchin of a son; receives the wisdom of the East from a Master Kwan; and becomes obsessed with Emily Roebling, the formidable wife of bridge engineer Washington Roebling. Naturally, Tom’s investigation leads to the drawling miscreants and a suitably explosive--or near-explosive--ending. “Suspension” may not be as breathtaking as the Brooklyn Bridge, but Crabbe knows how to demolish all resistance, even if we know better.

*

HOW ALL THIS STARTED

By Pete Fromm

Picador USA: 306 pp., $23

Pete Fromm is a short story writer from Montana, and his first novel comes equipped with a blurb suggesting that the book brings “together baseball and psychosis.” Although it has nothing to do with the bat-flinging Roger Clemens, “How All This Started” does offer a vivid perspective from the pitcher’s mound, in this case, from the West Texas desert, where 15-year-old Austin Scheer and his acid-tongued big sister Abilene work on becoming “fireballers,” hurling countless baseballs through an old tire. Abilene’s ferocious competitive energy is hopelessly entwined with her nurturing instincts. Having once been barred from the high school team because of her gender, Abilene is determined to turn Austin into the next Nolan Ryan. Still, the source of her manic drive remains unclear, though Fromm wants us to suspect it might be the kids’ nonrelationship with their parents. After all, Mom and Dad had the audacity to name them after the towns they were conceived in, a story they never tire of telling, of “how all this started.” But Fromm has something more up his sleeve: The story may not be true; Abilene’s increasingly dangerous behavior (she develops a taste for guns) might be due to a chemical imbalance; and the parents’ relentless remembering might be closing the kids off from the past. This is a gutsy, if workmanlike, effort in the manner of McGuane and McMurtry, full of mesquite, creosote and one girl’s violent encounters with the storm of herself.

*

ORANGE LAUGHTER

By Leone Ross

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 228 pp., $23

The slimness of “Orange Laughter,” the first novel by the British writer Leone Ross to be published in the United States, is deceptive: This is no modest little book for idle afternoons. Rather, Ross has created a dense, demanding and, quite often, frustrating vignette of intergenerational and interracial frustrations. Negotiating their paths through this thicket are three protagonists, all orphans in their way, and all destined to never recover--or recover from--the intense contact they shared back in North Carolina during the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. First off, there’s Tony, whose stream-of-semiconsciousness narration alternates with more conventional (and more lucid) chapters relating long-ago events. Tony dwells in the subway tunnels of New York; although Ross doesn’t always match the right lines with the right stations, she does create an engrossing, unlit atmosphere in which Tony’s churning imagination retraces long-ago events: His orphan boyhood in North Carolina, where he befriends a fat white fatherless kid named Mikey and is cared for by a beatific black social worker named Angela, whose spirit, he’s convinced, now haunts him in the crevices beneath Grand Central. When Tony, despite his mental illness, begins a correspondence with Mikey--now a respectable father married to an influential black poetess--the violence of 30 years ago resurfaces, like a fever that must be endured before it finally breaks. Despite Ross’ well-placed obsessions with modes of communication (letters, poems, deceptions, incoherence), Tony’s feverish ramblings--”man I used to be prettier than Mohammed Ali” [sic]--make for pretty rough going, giving this noble experiment an unfortunate taint of gimmickry.