FIRST FICTION

Simona Vinci’s debut won the prestigious Elsa Morante first-novel prize and became a bestseller when it was published in Italy in 1997. It arrives with sensation and controversy written all over it, but it’s really more of a haunting, well-turned curiosity than a major breakthrough. It’s about a society of kids living near Bologna who spend their days whizzing around on blades, bicycles and Vespas. For 10-year-old Martina and her peers Greta and Matteo, this childlike idyll--of anarchic freewheeling amid playgrounds and dappled fields--is only sporadically intruded upon by faint signals from the outside world: a Soundgarden tune, an episode of “90210.” With the arrival of 15-year-old Mirko and his sidekick Luca, however, these signals begin to take on a more plangent tone in the form of pornographic magazines, which Mirko mines for stage directions in an increasingly lurid sexual dramaturgy. With their innocent curiosity, Martina, Greta and Matteo are happy to play the roles assigned to them but, as it becomes clear that Mirko, too, is a sexual marionette, the group’s precocious games go from dangerous to deadly. Amid the escalating awfulness, Vinci’s prose--rendered here in a graceful, seamless translation--remains transcendentally calm, the better to convey the brutally adult lessons of disconnection that Martina and her friends learn yet barely understand: “Even if you know the smallest details of a body, you can never, ever share the secrets of the person living inside it.”

BEE SEASON By Myla Goldberg; Doubleday: 304 pp., $22.95

“What is a universe of A like? What’s a universe of Q?” These aren’t the typical questions a father asks his 9-year-old daughter, but in Myla Goldberg’s engaging first novel, straitlaced suburban family life becomes fertile ground for cosmic interrogations. The 9-year-old in question is Eliza Naumann, the daughter of Saul, a cabala-obsessed former hippie, and Miriam, a type-A lawyer. The shining star of the Naumann clan is the overachieving teenage son Aaron, but that changes when the just-average Eliza stuns the Naumanns by winning the district spelling bee with the word “vacuous.” Eliza then goes on to take the area finals in Philadelphia with “eyrir,” an Icelandic unit of currency (When she hears the word, it’s “a supernova inside Eliza’s head, unexpected but breathtakingly beautiful.”), thus winning a trip to the national bee in Washington, where she finally stumbles on “duvetyn.” As Saul and Eliza withdraw to prepare for next year’s bee season, studying dictionaries and sacred texts with Talmudic rigor, Aaron and Miriam get caught up in their own weird spiritual quests: Aaron, in an effort to define himself against his father, hooks up with the Hare Krishnas. Miriam, meanwhile, engages in an increasingly elaborate campaign of kleptomania, pilfering objects from malls and suburban homes in the name of tikkun--reassembling the broken pieces of the world. Goldberg, with abundant grace and humor, shows how these questionings have a way of splintering the Naumanns into volatile component parts and that only through a brave act of personal--and spiritual--denial will they become, once again, whole.

THE SOOTERKIN By Tom Gilling; Viking: 212 pp., $23.95

Tom Gilling is an Australian journalist, and not surprisingly his first novel--set in a rough-and-tumble down under port in 1821--is amusingly sprinkled with clippings from the imagined Hobart Town Gazette: “A Cucumber of large Size was grown this Season on a natural Bed in the Garden of the Rev. Mr Kidney at Cottage Green.” But “The Sooterkin” is anything but a simple news story. Between the ink-stained Victorian pronouncements of the Gazette and the darkly fantastical voice of his narrator, Gilling captures the edge-of-the-earth spirit of this muddy, work-in-progress community of sealers, speculators and stowaways. Because most of the news in Hobart Town tends to combine the ho-hum with the far-out, the locals are both astounded and readily credulous when a Mrs. Sarah Dyer gives birth to a seal pup. The town is soon flocking to the Dyers’ hovel to take a gander at its newest citizen, who is named Arthur, loves to swim and, much like any normal human baby, has a habit of relieving its bowels without warning. It is conjectured by some that Arthur is, in fact, a sooterkin, a goblin-like creature of Dutch origin; others--including the drunkard Mr. Dyer--surmise that Arthur is money in the bank. As an object of theological speculation, pseudo-scientific wonder and Barnum-esque conniving, Arthur is a perfect mascot for colonial life. Gilling, wisely, never relieves us of the mystery surrounding Arthur’s human birth, choosing instead to allow him to remain an enigma of the sea.