FIRST FICTION

Like Thomas Eakins’ paintings of 19th century scullers on the Schuykill, H.M. van den Brink’s debut novella meticulously depicts the transcendent quiet at the core of an oarsman’s exertions. His prose is as evanescent as the light on the surface of a river, and he treats history--in this case the early, foreboding days of World War II--as an easel painter would. By studying color and light--the fleeting moods and images of a long-ago summer, the bricks and canals of Amsterdam--he evokes manages to evoke an entire lost era, a forgotten Europe. It’s the summer of 1939, and an unlikely duo of teenage rowers--reticent, class-conscious Anton and charming, Jewish David--are being whipped into championship form by an exacting, vaguely comical German coach. This is an artful meditation on the out-of-time, out-of-body experience of intense training and competition and of the transformations of bodies and souls. As Anton, Van den Brink’s terse narrator, puts it: “Everything I could see was terrific. With this body I could do anything. As I flexed my muscles I knew that I’d never been so strong.” For Anton and David, their training is a transcendent, homoerotic ritual, but their glories are as ephemeral as a ripple; we come to realize that Anton is recalling this golden time as he strolls around war-torn Amsterdam five years later, a ghost in a ruin. Similarly, Van den Brink--in focusing us on the hard particulars of competition and youth--has given us this affecting, ghostly book.

THE CENTER OF THINGS, by Jenny McPhee, Doubleday: 248 pp., $22.95.

Jenny McPhee--translator of the pope and daughter of John McPhee--has written a surprisingly lighthearted novel, a kind of intellectual variety show in which you’re never sure what’s going to hit the stage next. While most novels get by on one or two narrative conceits, “The Center of Things” has no interest in being so centered. Thanks to the dilettantish preoccupations of McPhee’s heroine, a tabloid reporter named Marie, this book zigzags among a slew of big themes--Hollywood B movies, journalistic ethics, quantum physics, the nature and origins of the universe--while each chapter heading signals one big issue after another: “Time,” “Truth,” “Beauty,” “Love,” “Reality.” You might fear that something horribly postmodern is afoot here, but it really isn’t so. Instead, what develops is a charming tale of love, career and family as Marie, struggling in her job at the Gotham City Star, wins the assignment to write the obituary of Nora Mars, the controversial big-screen vixen whom Marie has spent her life worshipping. While Marie hunts down Nora’s lecherous ex and her hostile, hermited sister, McPhee splices in Marie’s searching conversations about physics with an eccentric loner who hangs out at the public library. If McPhee doesn’t always succeed in keeping these many balls in the air, she manages to get admirably close. And when matters appear to be spinning seriously out of control--like an ever-expanding universe--McPhee never fails to entertain.

A SKY SO CLOSE, By Betool Khedairi, Translated from the Arabic by Muhayman Jamil, Pantheon: 246 pp., $23.

The sky in the title of Betool Khedairi’s assured first novel--a roman a clef that travels from a village outside Baghdad to London--is one seen by a young girl on a swing. It’s an indelible moment of freedom for Khedairi’s nameless schoolgirl heroine, a child forever torn between her imperious Iraqi father and intolerant British mother. But as the years pass, this embraceable sky hanging over pastoral Zafaniya will eventually rain with carpet bombs during Desert Storm, “the coldest war of the modern age.” If it merely offered this glimpse into Iraq during the long, terrible years of the Iran-Iraq War and, later, the video-game conflict of The Mother of All Battles, “A Sky So Close” would be a valuable book. But Khedairi--an Iraqi writer now living in Jordan--has fashioned these ostentatious cataclysms into a backdrop for this often comical, often agonizing cross-cultural coming of age: Khedairi’s narrator reports with wide-open eyes--directing her prose, like an extended letter, to her father--on her parents’ half-hearted attempts to understand each other. It’s a barely sustainable detente that Khedairi sums up simply and beautifully: He prefers to dip his bread in date syrup while “she never misses what she calls ‘afternoon tea’ and her favorite sandwiches of jam and butter.” But what’s most remarkable here is the buoyancy that Khedairi sustains even as her child heroine grows up to witness her parents’ deaths, undergo sour relationships and artistic frustrations and, as a newly minted Westerner, look on helplessly while her homeland is destroyed nightly on CNN.