FIRST FICTION

LIGHT HOUSE By William Monahan; Riverhead: 224 pp., $21.95 “Art isn’t about talent anymore. It’s about Sincerity.� Thus is Tim Picasso, the precocious art student at the heart of William Monahan’s mad (and maddening) farce of a first novel, rudely informed by one of his envious, underachieving professors. Tim, understandably, chucks the notion of reaching artistic fame through honest means, and Monahan, too, plots his own flight from sincerity, preferring to tell Tim’s tale of ill-gotten gains and narrow escapes in a quasi-elevated, ironically episodic and determinedly clever style that may be overly enchanted with itself: Monahan’s riffs are like someone else’s home movies; they’re fascinating, totally unique and giddily self-involved. But that never stopped Dennis Miller, who, weirdly enough, may be the nearest antecedent for this admittedly singular and often hilarious little book, which herds a bizarre troupe of misfits into the drafty old Admiral Benbow Inn on the Massachusetts coast. There’s the innkeeper, George Hawthorne, a failed poet and feckless WASP; his wife, the insatiable and rather dim Magdalene; Mr. Glowery, a writer who labors tirelessly to become third rate; Professor Eggman, the Tourettic director of a “Professional Fiction Workshop�; Mr. Briscoe, a crusty Yankee who dresses up in women’s clothing; Jesus Castro, the murderous Miami drug lord whom Tim has ripped off; and, of course, Tim himself, who tries to hang on to a million and half bucks as a vicious nor’easter threatens to dash the Admiral Benbow into smithereens. Monahan has a refreshing disregard for believability, making “Light House�--which contains asides on Freud, Emerson, race and fiction itself--a seriously adult cartoon.

UNDER THE SKIN By Michel Faber; Harcourt: 312 pp., $23

For Isserley, a young woman who spends her days cruising obscure Scottish roads looking for hunky hitchhikers to pick up, this odd compulsion is not rooted so much in “the threat of danger, but in the allure of beauty.� In Michel Faber’s debut novel, danger and beauty intersect in some pretty weird ways as we gradually discover that Isserley isn’t just some weirdo on the prowl. In fact, she’s not even human, and the beauty she finds so entrancing isn’t really the buff male form but Scotland’s rugged landscape of mountains, firths and brooding skies. Isserley, it turns out, belongs to a subterranean species of lupine creatures that call themselves “human beings� but who need “vodsels�--people--for some obscurely sinister purpose; her native features have been doctored to approximate human proportions--scrupulously furless body, thick spectacles to correct her giant eyes, improbable breast augmentation. It’s as if, through Isserley’s compromised physique, Faber is commenting on the cumbersome and ridiculous accouterments of being a person, and his interrogations continue in the form of Isserley’s victims, who, while seemingly flying free on society’s margins, inevitably come with baggage: bad marriages, crappy jobs, sexual compulsions. What a relief then, when Isserley finally injects these losers with knockout doses of tranquilizer and drags them back to the lair. Faber, for his part, offers a ride deep into a misanthropic hinterland, where a creepy kind of detachment transforms human beings into mere “shrimps nestling on the seabed under an ocean of pale blue oxygen.�

FAKE LIAR CHEAT By Tod Goldberg; MTV Books: 178 pp., $11.95 paper

The title of this amiable, wafer-thin Hollywood send-up is not so much a mantra of self-recrimination as it is a three-pronged strategy for success or, at least, a recipe for having a crazy good time at other people’s expense before running for your life. Lonnie Milton, Tod Goldberg’s X-er hero and inspired troublemaker, is “an up-and-coming star,� but not in the sense of landing a recurring role on “Dawson’s Creek.� Lonnie’s star is rising on a more mundane horizon: He’s a headhunter at the mockingly named Staff Genius temp agency, where he convinces employers to give boring jobs to unemployable drones. But when Lonnie bumps into a mysterious, manipulative and money-obsessed temptress named Claire at a local bookstore, he realizes he might as well put his scamming abilities to better use. He gets sucked into a dine-and-dash scheme with Claire that takes the two of them to every fab restaurant in town, where they pose--amid Hollywood’s biggest poseurs--as industry big deals. (Note to self: Hollywood is full of fakery and falsehood. Perhaps a confidence game. Watch out!) Of course, it isn’t long before our young con artist goes from Hollywood predator to the bottom of the food chain. In true B-movie fashion, Goldberg isn’t fussy about causality, and he delivers his big theme--Hollywood is bad and will eat you up--with all the subtlety of a jumbo concession-stand Pepsi being spilled in your lap.