FIRST FICTION

WORMWOOD; By D. J. Levien; (Miramax Books: 248 pp., $22.95)

Synergy, here we come: D. J. Levien, a promising screenwriter, has written a propulsive first novel that has film option written all over it. It’s about a guy named, appropriately, Nathan Pitch, a determined sapling from back East who has come to Hollywood not to become an actor but, with a promising lack of shame, to launch a career as a movie mogul. For some reason, Nathan is surprised to learn that Hollywood is more about vain, backstabbing agents who brandish bullwhips at cowering cubicled assistants than it is about Art. Disillusioned by his impure surroundings, Nathan is drawn to a purer kind of dissolution: Absinthe sipping has become Hollywood’s latest trend, and Nathan finds himself building up an impressive appetite for the green stuff that made ennui famous. Nathan’s bumpy ride through a string of unforgiving industry jobs--and his equally unforgiving romps with a high-heeled, convertible-driving succubus--make for titillating reportage. But though Levien’s attempt to compare the reckless strivings of Hollywood to fin de siecle, absinthe-tinged decadence is a fun notion, it doesn’t really add up: Can you imagine Des Esseintes with a Palm Pilot? Oscar Wilde taking a meeting? Alas, when Nathan despairs that “storytelling was well behind counting money in this town,” we know all too well what he means.

CIRCLING THE DRAIN; By Amanda Davis; (William Morrow / Rob Weisbach: 192 pp., $23)

In “The Very Moment They’re About,” one of the 15 brief stories that make up Amanda Davis’ debut collection, a girl and a boy at summer camp do a slow dance at a party on the second-to-last night of camp: “[T]hey lean into each other, unsure of what lies around the next curve, unsure of the very moment they are about to devour.” At their best, Davis’ stories are potent miniatures about the weird demands that uncertainty and inevitability place upon people, mostly young women linked to men or situations seemingly beyond their control. In “Red Lights Like Laughter,” the girlfriend of a firebug named Gary, hiding out in a sleazy hotel during a blizzard, mulls over the terrible arson she’s committed at his urging; in “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky like Balloons,” a woman can’t quite shake her charismatic ex-boyfriend, whose presence seems to have supernatural effects; in “Spice,” a chef named Billy Foo, who has the ability to accurately spice food based solely upon a customer’s appearance, meets his nemesis; and, in “The Visit,” a girl who attempts to converse with her Alzheimer’s-stricken grandfather discovers that their roles have been reversed. Throughout this collection, Davis’ surreal lyricism illuminates the treacherous gap between power and powerlessness.

RUN CATCH KISS; By Amy Sohn; (Simon & Schuster: 256 pp., $23)

One reads Amy Sohn’s gleefully exhibitionist “Female Trouble” column in the giveaway New York Press (a less Foucault-enamored version of the Village Voice) with equal parts astonished admiration and mounting horror at the calculated brazenness of it all. The same could be said of Sohn’s comic first novel, which appears to be a fictionalized account of her own experiences as a reporter who tends to fictionalize her daunting array of sexual (or near sexual) encounters. Sohn’s 22-year-old alter ego is Ariel Steiner; she’s Brooklyn bred, Brown educated and just barely on the near side of zaftig. After bombing as an actress, Ariel cranks out a piece about inflatable love called “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” and sends it off to the editors of New York’s City Week. Soon enough, she’s writing a weekly column about her downtown-and-dirty sex life called “Run Catch Kiss” and swiftly becoming “the vamp the city loved to hate.” But Ariel discovers a downside to her vocation: Impotent junkies, sex in peep-show booths and flatulence in bed make good copy, but true love, alas, does not. Likewise, readers of Sohn’s novel may find Ariel’s sexual misadventures more gratifying than her attempts to hold down a meaningful relationship.

3 DOLLARS; By Elliot Perlman; (MacMurray & Beck: 358 pp., $22)

Elliot Perlman’s debut novel, “3 Dollars,” was a pretty big deal when it was published in Australia last year. It’s a coming-belatedly-of-age story about Eddie Harnovey, a likable fellow who has the strange habit of running into his unobtainable boyhood love, Amanda, every 9 1/2 years; who, at various foreboding junctures, finds that he has $3 to his name; and who tends to size himself up with brutal yet winsome honesty. On his youth: “I was essentially just an egocentric pseudo-intellectual slob motivated only by facile romantic notions”; and on his adulthood: “I was a lettuce of a man in a shirt and tie being tossed about by the wind.” Eddie manages to get through university despite being more interested in Joy Division and the Clash than his eventual albatross-like degree in chemical engineering and marries a beautiful and stunningly intellectual woman named Tanya. Together they have a beautiful daughter, but Tanya’s uncompleted dissertation turns into a yawning abyss and Eddie slowly discovers that his sensible job (not to mention his life, politics and the global economic situation) is turning into a major nightmare. Perlman is wise enough to ground this smart, if not quite taut, Irving-like tale on a foundation of mischief and good humor.

L. A. BREAKDOWN; By Lou Mathews; (The British Book Co.: 252 pp., $24.95)

Lou Mathews, a veteran journalist and editor, has written an understated novel that deftly captures the mood of mid-’60s Los Angeles and the waning days of one of its signature subcultures: drag racing. His hero is Fat Charlie, an innocuous busybody who likes to hang out at Van de Kamp’s drive-in, where the local racing talent congregates. Charlie doesn’t have the chops or the engine to compete for “Legend” status, but he “starts races, holds bets, runs errands and occasionally sells car parts that aren’t too difficult to steal.” He’s a go-between among the regulars at Van de Kamp’s: Vaca, an odious wheel chair-bound racing nut; Brody, Vaca’s hard-drinking driver; Reinhard, their cool, alimony-owing rival; Lamont, a dopey kid with a crappy home life; and Connie, a sassy, rail-thin girl that Charlie can’t stop thinking about. Like so many tales of this thoroughly mined era, “L. A. Breakdown” moves ineluctably toward both the loss of innocence and the recruitment center: The shadow of Vietnam is, understandably, ever present. But Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil.