First fiction

The Pearl Diver

Jeff Talarigo

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 256 pp., $18.95

Jeff TALARIGO’S hypnotic first novel is set on the beautiful island of Nagashima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. It begins in the wake of World War II and unfolds in delicate episodes tagged as shards of recollection: “Artifact Number 0357 -- A Wedding Band Made of Seashell,” “Artifact Number 0400 -- A Map of the Town of Mushiage,” “Artifact Number 0623 -- A Cherry Tree Bonsai.” Talarigo’s prose is as evocative as a Hokusai woodcut, rendering Nagashima in deft, economical strokes. It’s a devastatingly effective strategy: Nagashima, you see, is a leprosarium -- a leper colony.

In December of 1948, a nameless teenage pearl diver is sent to Nagashima. The only sign of her disease is a spot on her left arm, and the shift from her daily routine to a life sentence in Nagashima’s sanitarium is extreme: One day she’s plumbing the chill waters for oysters and sea urchins, having meals with her hardworking farm family and dreaming of the future, and the next she’s shipped off and stripped of her very identity.

When she arrives at Nagashima, she’s told, “Your number is 2645. Don’t forget it. 2645.” She’s instructed by her fellow lepers to concoct a new name for herself, something happy. She chooses Miss Fuji.

Leprosy was known in the Middle Ages as “the living death,” and Talarigo aptly portrays the Nagashima Leprosarium as an inescapable purgatory. Miss Fuji is dead to her family. Her one visit from her sister is a brutal reminder that she’s been expunged from the official family record. She is forced to work in Clinic B, where abortions are performed on unwilling women, a repugnant task that puts her daily at the divide between life and death. Her only escapes are to wade over to a neighboring island during low tide and, later, as an old woman, to attend a concert of the Blue Bird Band in Kyoto. All the while, drug treatments keep her disease in check, even though political and social pressure require her to live in quarantine.

“The Pearl Diver” is a rare creation -- a beautiful fable about ugliness, where self-worth is created, like a pearl, from unpromising circumstances.

*

What to Keep

Rachel Cline

Random House: 294 pp., $23.95

Rachel CLINE is a recovering screenwriter, and her debut novel -- about a girl from Columbus, Ohio, who goes to Hollywood to make it as an actress and eventually winds up in New York trying to make it as a playwright -- zings along with cinematic flair. What’s surprising, though, is just how probing this story is, as it unfolds in triptych (1976, 1990, 2000) and illuminates the shadowy interstices of family life.

Denny Roman (given name, Eden) is Cline’s heroine. When we first meet her, she’s 12 years old and presenting her mother, Lily, with a Hostess Sno Ball. It’s her mother’s birthday, and the Sno Ball in question becomes a metaphoric breast, the first of many mischievous takes on parenting. The birthday, meanwhile, is an utter mess: Lily, a neuroscientist divorced from Denny’s neuroscientist dad, gets into a car wreck, wanders into a beauty salon with a concussion and miscarries -- she’d recently conceived on an airplane -- in a police squad car.

In 1990, Denny returns to a relatively calmer Columbus from L.A. Lily and her second husband, Phil (the man from the plane), are preparing to move to New York, where Lily has won a prestigious post at Columbia. As Denny combs through her childhood stuff (Dr. Seuss books, her trusty old “blankie”), she secretly preps for a big meeting with Robert Altman. Fast forward to 2000, and Denny’s play, “Gray Matter Theater,” is going up off-Broadway when an unexpected guest arrives at her doorstep: Luke, the 12-year-old son of the family’s longtime helpmeet, Maureen, an organizational wonder who’d mothered Denny and Lily and has recently died. Luke’s father was a Mauritanian refugee cabby, and as Luke struggles to define himself -- in terms of family, self and identity -- we find Denny still juggling these very issues.

“What to Keep” is a mad tangle of personal histories, full of characters who are as tangibly real as they are completely AWOL. As Denny comes to learn, in an epiphanic moment that could be this exquisite melodrama’s epigraph, “Not everyone who’s absent is dead.”