A CHILD’S BOOK OF TRUE CRIMEBy Chloe...

A CHILD’S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME

By Chloe Hooper

Scribner: 240 pp., $24

“Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to: atom by atom.” “Missing is such a polite word.” “A lawyer is as interested as any criminal in how to sideswipe a rule.” Chloe Hooper’s impressive first novel is full of startling observations that nudge along a curious story of a schoolteacher in Tasmania and her affair with the father of her most gifted student.

The teacher in question is Kate Byrne, and her Tasmanian tenure has all the markings of temporary encampment: She’s recently graduated from college, cut off from the mainland and embroiled in a futile pornographic liaison. Just as Kate plays the schoolgirl for her lover, “A Child’s Book of True Crime” blurs the boundaries between childhood and adulthood: There’s Lucien, the star pupil, posing disturbingly adult questions; and Lucien’s father, Thomas, her middle-aged lover, re-exploring younger, randier days.

But Thomas’ wife, Veronica, rears up as a menacing symbol of the highly grown-up concept of consequence: She’s written a true-crime book about a local girl who was murdered for having an affair, and she seems to have caught a whiff of Thomas and Kate’s goings-on. As Kate begins to question her personal safety, these role- and age-playing games threaten to become nightmarish.

Hooper furnishes this oddly bracing tale with childlike drawings and a kind of parallel, kiddy-lit version of events, in which Terence Tiger and Kitty Koala discuss forensics and blood-typing techniques. The result is a charming, surreal bedtime story about disturbing sex, gruesome murder and one woman’s attempt to escape into adulthood.

*

NO PLACE, LOUISIANA

By Martin Pousson

Riverhead: 262 pp., $24.95

Nita, the ever-aspiring heroine of Martin Pousson’s superb debut, moves from daughter to girlfriend to wife to mother as if she’s desperately fleeing each of life’s stages. Raised in the Louisiana bayou country and painfully conscious of her white-trash roots, she’s “sick of this place, sick of Acadiana, sick of the word Cajun.”

She’s really sick of herself, and it’s one of the many wonders of this quietly riveting story of familial tribulation that we never tire of the embittered Nita and her desultory march toward middle age. It’s probably because Nita’s dissatisfaction is so well earned: Fatherless, futureless and forced to work in a sleazy diner as a teen, she assents to a halfhearted marriage proposal from Louis, the son of a well-to-do farmer and his cruel, never-satisfied wife, Anna.

Anna is the mother-in-law from hell, and every one of Nita’s good-faith efforts--at cooking, cleaning, decorating, child-rearing--is met with Anna’s ridicule. Nita has little recourse but to aim her bottled-up affections at her son, Marc, a precocious boy who stands in dialectical contrast to daughter Jo, a toddler hellion who eventually grows into a party-hearty teenager.

While Jo’s musical tastes run to Black Sabbath, Marc dabbles in Streisand, causing Nita to go into a homophobic talespin. Louis, meanwhile, is powerless in the face of his wife’s mounting disappointments, her demands for increasingly showy automobiles and her heartbreaking aloneness. “No Place, Louisiana” is the Southern answer to “The Ice Storm”; from its sultry pages there emerges a chilling portrait of a family in the midst of a very deep freeze.

*

THE CYCLIST

By Viken Berberian

Simon & Schuster: 190 pp., $21

“Six eyes for an eye, a dozen hands for a hand.” This is the mad calculus that seeps into the impressionable mind of the nameless terror operative who narrates this novella from Viken Berberian. If Berberian boldly puts a face on terrorism, then it’s nothing like the defiant mug of Atta: Berberian’s Druse terrorist is little more than an overgrown boy.

He’s a gourmand or a glutton, depending on how you look at it, and each page resounds with meals remembered or anticipated, savored or rejected, from Westphalian ham to savory falafel to humble lentils, which inspire in him a certain distaste, and the following meditation, handed down by his dear mother: “Just as the lentil is round, so mourning comes round to all the denizens of the world.”

“The Cyclist” is littered with these muted justifications of mass murder; it’s as if Berberian’s terrorist--whose assignment is to deliver a bomb to a Lebanese hotel by bicycle--is forever looking back upon the deadly mayhem he’s yet to unleash.

It’s impossible to know whether Berberian has penetrated the terrorist mind or if he’s concocted a rich, feast-like fantasy; either way, “The Cyclist” provokes both horror and sympathy as it examines the Middle East’s never-ending cycle of violent retribution.