FIRST FICTION

WHAT SHE SAW IN . . . By Lucinda Rosenfeld; Random House: 282 pp., $23.95

Lucinda Rosenfeld is a former New York Post night-life columnist, and her first novel, which traces the guy-by-guy romantic history of a nice Jewish girl named Phoebe Fine, is a collection of deceptively snappy dispatches from the darker outposts of the dating game. Its reportage is slick yet deadly accurate, its characters two-dimensional yet damningly hilarious, its heroine insecure, bitchy and superficial and yet there’s a wicked honesty to Phoebe’s accounting, even as she’s deluding herself that each successive boyfriend just might be the one. There’s Stinky Mancuso, the troubled James Dean of ultra-suburban Whitehead Middle School; Spitty Clark, the preppy meathead who just might be a serial date rapist; Humphrey Fung, the overstimulated women’s studies major who dresses in kilts; Bruce Bledstone, Hoover University’s studly visiting professor of hegemony; and Neil Schmertz, the perfect gentleman who lulls Phoebe, now twentysomething in New York, into baby-talking discontentment. Phoebe lapses into these affairs as if absent-mindedly strolling through a wax museum of romantic types: “She found it so much easier letting other people make decisions for her. She found that the people who made decisions for her were the people she was the most attracted to in life.” This isn’t the usual Gen-X after-hours talk, and Rosenfeld, in this smart, bitterly comic novel, makes sure that Phoebe isn’t merely an Ivy League Bridget Jones. In the end, Phoebe becomes something rather formidable: a real person whose shallowness and fear make each failed liaison true and whose zigzagging career only seems to lead back to where it began.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards by Whit Stillman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 340 pp., $24

“All of us, except Charlotte, loved the movie--not entirely surprising, since so did all good film critics the world over (i.e. not David Denby).” It’s not often that narrators of novels can make pronouncements about their portrayals on the big screen or that filmmakers can take pot-shots at their critics from the relatively safe sniper pit of a novelization. But “The Last Days of Disco” is intent on turning common conceptions on their heads: that novels must precede movies; that disco sucked; and that guys who make their own films can’t write books. Whit Stillman is the writer and director of the 1998 film “The Last Days of Disco,” and this book version of that film is his first novel, or rather, as the book’s sometimes distracting conceit goes, Jimmy Steinway’s first novel. Jimmy is Stillman’s narrator, a somewhat half-assed advertising guy with a huge crush on Alice, a mysterious, sweet girl who works in publishing and who, we’re told, did not actually look like Chloe Sevigny, the ingenue who played her in the movie. As in the film, Jimmy and his Park Avenue crowd contemplate life, love and “Le Freak” at a downtown club called The Club; it’s 1980, and as a cadre of suitors swirls around Alice, the calendar tips into 1981--the Reagan era--and we get the unsettling feeling of a Lost Generation taking its last dance. As this genteel, opinionated costume drama argues, it was morning in America in the worst way, as unwelcome as dawn after an all-night party.

CONEY by Avram Ducovny; Overlook: 320 pp., $26.95

Halfway through Avram Ducovny’s first novel, 15-year-old Harry Catzker finds himself among a group of Coney Island sideshow freaks who regale him with “tales resembling a musical round.” Ducovny’s story--of Harry’s coming of age in Brooklyn on the eve of World War II--shares a similar quality, of episodic tales about the perils of assimilation that take shape, overlap and fade away. It’s tempting to conclude that “Coney’s” component parts don’t quite add up, but the experience of reading this book is not unlike a woozy walk down a carnival midway, where the distractions of the moment are as irresistible as they are strange and foreboding. Against this kaleidoscopic backdrop--with its oddball population of immigrants, crooks and weirdos--Harry finds an unlikely pal in Woody, a dwarf bicycle salesman, who gives him a job picking up betting slips from various Coney establishments, including the house of freaks, where Harry finds outcast solidarity and a lover in Fifi, a 500-pound fat lady. At home, Harry receives Socratic tutelage from the Catzkers’ boarder, a Yiddish poet whose shadowy past could get him deported back to Europe just as dark news trickles in from across the ocean, and Harry’s community becomes a fun-house mirror to world events. Ducovny has a flair for an earthy kind of Americana, filled with adulteries, molestations, petty crimes and one boy’s efforts to find his place in a world going up in flames.