First Fiction

THE BASIC EIGHT

By Daniel Handler

Thomas Dunne / St. Martin’s:

330 pp., $23.95

*

Senior year can really suck. Just ask Flannery Culp, the teenage heroine and narrator of this venomous debut, which is like a Young Adult novel gone gloriously--and sneeringly--to seed. For Flan, who keeps a detailed journal of the tumultuous year in which she’s eventually labeled a Satanic-cult murderer, life at San Francisco’s soul-numbing Roewer High is all about the Basic Eight--an incestuous clique of precocious friends who resemble the Algonquin Round Table as much as “Dawson’s Creek.” They’re a snipey and privileged set, given to parking their cars in the faculty lot and arguing over the proper way to bake a brie. In fact, they’re all so staggeringly above average that it’s hard to tell them apart; along with Flan, there’s Kate, Jennifer Rose Milton, V, Douglas, Lily, Gabriel and, finally, Natasha, the cool girl who’s everything the fat-obsessed Flan wishes she could be. Despite the fortress-like security of the Basic Eight, Flan begins to experience some pretty harsh real-world stuff: Her truancy is compromising her chances to get into an Ivy, her lecherous bio teacher is getting scarier by the minute and, worst of all, Adam State, the boy she’s not-so-secretly in love with, is showing absolutely no interest in her. Bad move. When a freaked-out Flan gets hold of a croquet mallet and a baguette at a drunken party, all hell breaks loose. Daniel Handler makes an engagingly clueless murderess out of Flan: She’s plagued less by conscience than she is by the schlock theories about her rampage offered up by the likes of broadcast queen Winnie Moprah, and her own version of events is sprinkled, textbook-style, with bold-face vocabulary words and facetious “Study Questions” along the lines of “Everybody keeps getting mad at Flannery, but it’s not her fault. Discuss.” Is nothing safe from Handler’s ridicule? Please try to use the word “Columbine” in your answer.

*

SCHRODINGER’S BABY

By H.R. McGregor

William Morrow: 250 pp., $22

The conundrum of Schrodinger’s cat--a quantum experiment designed to show that opposites can coexist--reverberates throughout this novel about a motley group of flat mates in Glasgow, in which eithers and ors--life and death, truth and lies--pile up like butts in an overflowing undergraduate-house ashtray. Juliet Porteus is a veterinary student up from London, where her arty bourgeois family is a bit mystified by her fierce adherence to science. She finds a like-minded soul in an Italian student named Petruchio, who, for all his certainty, wraps Mark Rozzo is a contributing writer to Book Review.

himself in a cocoon of Valium. Billy, a cocksure Scot, and Kerry, a waifish Irish girl, round out the household; they’re both actors, and the flat becomes a gathering place for hopeful young thespians who love to tease the comparatively dour Juliet and Petruchio. Soon enough, the sensible Juliet is drawn to Kerry, whose passions, insecurities and good looks allow her to flourish on the stage, where she catches the attention of Sophie and Geoffrey Daniels, a couple of flashy agents from London. Yet even at the first whiff of success, we begin to smell danger in the form of Kerry’s increasing unreliability, the agents’ eyebrow-raising sexual habits and Juliet’s discovery of a “tacky-looking cadaver” on the flat’s doorstep. When the corpse vanishes, Juliet is left to wonder if she’s been hallucinating or whether her flat mates--particularly Kerry, who’s now her lover--might have more secrets than Juliet has bargained for. McGregor charts the murkier depths of denial and betrayal in this story about a girl looking for answers she doesn’t want to hear.

*

THE MENTOR

By Sebastian Stuart

Bantam: 246 pp., $22.95

It’s unclear whether it was Sebastian Stuart’s intent to write a genre novel, but his slim, bleak debut--about a popular writer’s determination to revive a stalled career at all costs--works best when placed in the grimy context of noir. Its cliches about the writing life--and can there really be anything but cliches when it comes to writers and what they do?--then become excusable as aspects of a satisfyingly pulpy milieu in which three characters, all with motives to kill, converge upon one another. They are Charles Davis, whose first novel put him on the literary map 25 years ago but whose new book, “Capitol Offense,” is a big flop; Anne Turner, his elegant and successful wife, who seems to have been modeled on Martha Stewart (which, of course, puts the reader on immediate alert that someone might understandably want to snuff her); and young Emma Bowles, an awkward girl temping at Anne’s upscale catalog company. In order to get Charles organized, Anne hires Emma to be his personal assistant. Aging insecure writer plus impressionable nubile: It’s amazing that Anne hasn’t done the math, but she soon--and rightly--suspects that the two of them are going at it. What she doesn’t initially suspect, however, is that Emma has a book coming out of her, helped along by Charles’ patient midwifery. Is Emma, who turns out to have spent time in a mental hospital, conniving or just naive? And is Charles content merely to be Emma’s mentor, or is this book just what he needs to reestablish his own reputation? Stuart isn’t quite as hard-boiled as pulp fiction writer Charles Willeford, but he gets suspicion bouncing all over the place in this slight but wholly entertaining debut.