First Fiction

Twelve Bar Blues, Patrick Neate, Grove Press: 402 pp., $24

English novelist Patrick Neate makes his American debut with this multigenerational, multicultural odyssey of a novel that won the prestigious Whitbread Award when it was published in Britain last year. Centering on the birth of “hot jazz” in New Orleans, “Twelve Bar Blues” blows with all its might over 400 pages, shifting between continents like an old pro stampeding through key changes and tackling 200 years of intermingling African, American and British history along the way.

Of the book’s several players, its standout is Lick Holden, a gifted black cornetist who grew up during the teens and ‘20s in a rough-and-tumble “Cooltown” on the outskirts of New Orleans. Surrounded by an inchoate household of prostitutes and riffraff, the good-hearted Lick survives a brutal correctional school, masters the steamy new music, rubs shoulders with Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory and pines for his high-yellow stepsister, Sylvie, a prostitute and sometime singer who attempts to pass in white society.

If Lick’s story of jazz, assimilation and heartbreak forms the basic progression of “Twelve Bar Blues,” it’s the stories of Lick’s ancestors and descendants that provide the blue notes: In particular, there’s Sylvia Di Napoli, a beautiful, aging London prostitute (and sometime singer) whose Italian surname can’t explain her obvious African heritage (we recognize her as Lick’s granddaughter). On her hilarious journey to New York, Chicago and New Orleans to untangle her American roots, she’s joined by two suitors who echo her intertwined identity: Jim Tulloh, a well-meaning English boozehound, and Musa, a reefer-smoking witchdoctor who mysteriously shows up from the African village where Sylvia’s (and Lick’s) people originally came from.

If it all sounds rather cosmic, it is. “Twelve Bar Blues” is an anything-goes melting-pot hybrid of “Ragtime” and “White Teeth.” And Neate clearly loves the bandstand, tossing off neat -- sometimes too neat -- riffs: “[F]ate is a perverse trickster with no sense of timing”; “there ain’t nothin’ so damn complicated as a story”; “in jazz music the future, the past and the present are all happenin’ right now.”

Although Neate hits the occasional clam (the Empire State Building and the TriBeCa neighborhood didn’t exist in 1926) and his sense of drama can’t possibly match that of an Armstrong solo, “Twelve Bar Blues” is an entertaining reminder that “fate can improvise like the most nimble-fingered pianist.”

*

Edinburgh, Alexander Chee, Picador USA: 212 pp., $13 paper

Two-thirds of the way through “Edinburgh,” Alexander Chee’s impressive first novel, Aphias Zhe, known as Fee, offers another of his typically startling admissions: “I no longer spent all my time wanting to die, but I was fairly apprehensive about being alive.” Fee, who grows up in Maine with Korean and English heritage, is a seductive storyteller, as hardheaded as he is equivocal: He’s a survivor who flirts with suicide ideation; an earnest kid who occasionally finds himself freebasing coke or tripping his brains out; a victim of a pedophile who grows up to be a fairly well-adjusted gay adult, albeit one with some understandable issues.

When we first meet Fee, he’s trying out for the Pine State Boys Chorus and developing an obsession with Peter, a towheaded choir mate who becomes his best friend. While their pedophile choir master, Big Eric, works his way through the soprano section, Fee and Peter find their child world colliding with encroaching teenhood: The ‘80s are upon us, and the duo take a liking to hard-core shows, Marlboros and patch-elbow sweaters from Goodwill.

“Edinburgh” has delightful period touches, but it’s hardly sentimental: Big Eric is busted for his odious crimes; Peter later commits suicide, leaving Fee forever heavy-hearted; and Fee’s erstwhile adolescent lover does himself in too. In fact, there’s so much suicide and impropriety in “Edinburgh” that it begins to seem improbable. But Fee and his world remain stubbornly real, even as they aspire to poetry: “[M]y voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest,” Fee tells us of his choir days. In “Edinburgh,” Chee’s voice is every bit as celestial.