FIRST FICTION

This Is Not

Civilization

Robert Rosenberg

Houghton Mifflin: 296 pp., $24

“I do not understand you, Jeff. The world is everywhere! You have seen too much of it, I think.” The Jeff in question is Jeff Hartig, globe-trotting aid worker and incurable bleeding heart. He’s the peripatetic hero of Robert Rosenberg’s brimming first novel, which crisscrosses the planet from an Arizona Indian reservation to the forsaken hinterlands of Kyrgyzstan to that eternal multicultural crossroads and earthquake-prone metropolis, Istanbul. Along the way, Jeff, who can’t refuse any opportunity to assist the world’s disenfranchised, encounters sheep eyeballs as cuisine, numerous vodka-induced blackouts, assorted erotic episodes and blowups, and, as each chapter journeys further into “This Is Not Civilization’s” mad tangle of an international narrative, the evolution of his own person from big brother figure to savior to paramour to escapist to fool to self-satisfied American jerk and back again.

The above rebuke -- a helpful reminder that everywhere is, after all, somewhere -- comes from Nazira, a comely Kyrgyz lass with whom Jeff has a brief, convenient dalliance. (She’s the daughter of Jeff’s oafish host, Anarbek Tashtanaliev). Jeff has come to Nazira’s village -- the tongue-twisting Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka -- on a two-year English-teaching stint, encountering a post-Soviet landscape of fraud, corruption and a cheese factory that produces no cheese. His previous mission had gotten him run off an Arizona reservation (America’s own forgotten outback), where he befriended a young basketballer named Adam Dale but attracted the resentment of an Apache gangster wannabe. In both far-flung locales, so different and yet so much alike, Jeff’s idealism is roughed up by the entrenched locals, who wallow in their National Geographic-worthy traditionalism and poverty.

“This Is Not Civilization” is a brave adventure into the heart of a new world connected by discount air fare, e-mail, charity organizations and the unquenchable thirst for novelty. This world is indeed everywhere, and Jeff is infected with a virus to see every corner of it. And when Jeff’s various global associates -- Anarbek, Adam and Nazira -- all descend upon his Istanbul apartment, you get the queasy, and often hilarious, sense of a limitless world grown claustrophobic. Rosenberg -- who based this novel on his own hitch with the Peace Corps -- has created a sparkling new take on Jorge Luis Borges’ map drawn to the exact scale of the actual world, in which every place -- and person -- is at once at our fingertips and yet hopelessly out of reach.

*

Corpus Christi

Bret Anthony Johnston

Random House: 260 pp., $23.95

The 10 stories that make up Bret Anthony Johnston’s auspicious debut collection attempt to map Corpus Christi, Texas, and its environs, “where the heat is wet and exhausting, and the land feels as wide open as the ocean.” It’s hurricane country, and Johnston’s exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi’s own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory.

“Waterwalkers,” the aptly titled opener, sets the tone of rain-swept loss, when an ex-couple -- divided by years and a dead son -- bump into each other at a lumber store as Hurricane Alicia churns toward the shoreline. The liminal terrain of a psych ward provides the backdrop of the title story, in which a tormented couple, Edie and Charlie, invent a baby to appease Edie’s crazy mother. (Charlie holds out the phone to an empty room. “The little bug snores,” the would-be grandmother says.) “Two Liars” further explores uncertain parental turf when a besieged dad hatches an ingenious scheme to torch the family house and collect the insurance.

But the centerpiece of “Corpus Christi” is a rich triptych -- its three panels dispersed throughout the book -- that depicts the thorny relationship between Minnie Marshall, whose cancer has metastasized in her brain, and her son, Lee, who has abandoned his own life to drive her to the clinic, change her diapers and, ultimately, convey her to the next world. It’s a stunning and complex portrait of an indelible alliance that, like the one forged by that storm-tossed couple in “Waterwalkers,” “threatened to pass within a breath.”