First Fiction

God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories

Tom Bissell

Pantheon: 212 pp., $20

Tom BISSELL was only 29 when he made his nonfiction debut with “Chasing the Sea,” a brilliant, hilarious ramble through the detritus of the Soviet empire in Central Asia. Now, two years later, he follows up with a collection of stories, “God Lives in St. Petersburg.” And guess what? The author -- whose jacket photo still suggests a candidate for varsity wrestling as well as the chess club presidency -- is no less adept at fiction. The wit and dry-eyed compassion are on ample display, along with a precocious capacity for invention that would put most golden codgers to shame.

“God Lives in St. Petersburg” touches many of the same geographic bases as its predecessor. “Expensive Trips Nowhere” takes place in Kazakhstan, “Death Defier” in Afghanistan at the tail end of the Taliban era. And while the young narrator of “The Ambassador’s Son” never names the Central Asian capital he treats as his personal rumpus room, except to note that it was “so corrupt that you had to bribe yourself to get out of bed in the morning,” it turns out to be Tashkent, in Uzbekistan.

Bissell does local color like a pro. More to the point, though, is his exploration of the psychic sinkhole the region represents for its well-intentioned American visitors. Aid workers, reporters, evangelists: None makes a dent in the general atmosphere of ruination. Some fall apart. Others slip into paralysis, like the hapless English teacher who keeps mulling over Paul’s non-motivational Epistle to the Romans: I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.

Still others derive a kind of Hippocratic consolation from simply doing no harm. Regarding a rural torrent contaminated by nuclear fallout, one character “imagines all of Kazakhstan’s rivers as great glowing veins carrying their ghastly chemotherapy to the nation’s every corner. That there is something catastrophically wrong right before his eyes, something he can do nothing to alleviate or worsen, fills him with almost holy relief.”

Here and there Bissell’s youth betrays him. He has a tendency to pile on the similes, and it’s interesting to note that the only tale with an American setting, “Animals in Our Lives,” happens to be the runt of the litter. No matter. These stories are one more proof of a stunning and prodigious talent.

*

Prep

Curtis Sittenfeld

Random House: 408 pp., $21.95

Curtis SITTENFELD makes Tom Bissell look like a late bloomer. In 1992, when she was 16, she won a fiction contest at Seventeen magazine. Since then she has contributed to a host of publications and currently teaches at the venerable St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. Having also attended such an institution herself (Groton, ‘94), Sittenfeld may be said to have spent a lifetime preparing for the much-buzzed “Prep.”

The narrator, Lee Fiora, takes us through four long years at New England’s Ault School. Since she’s a scholarship student from the non-snooty South Bend, Ind., Lee is an outsider from the start. Yet she quickly latches onto the school’s code of reticence.

“I did not act on what I wanted,” she recalls, “I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.”

Lee copes with the customary teenage sorrows: homework, bad skin, a hopeless crush on a high-profile guy. Her rank near the bottom of Ault’s caste system is a source of constant, gnawing depression.

This, too, shall pass, you want to tell her. The tempests and tantrums will fade away, as they do for everybody after playing havoc with our younger, more malleable selves. Luckily the author has a delicate sense of proportion. She gives Lee’s agonies their due but also makes it clear that they’re not (as our parents pointlessly told us) the end of the world.

What she doesn’t do, I’m afraid, is join John Knowles or Richard Yates in the pantheon of Boarding School Lit. There are too many dead spots here, too much pedestrian prose that wouldn’t be out of place in, well, Seventeen. Clearly Sittenfeld has the chops. But given its heft and ambition, “Prep” fulfills the worst fear of its protagonist: It doesn’t quite make the grade.