Brooklyn in the age of disco

Sixteen-year-old Valentine Kessler is the “spitting image of the Blessed Virgin Mary as she appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes,” but nobody notices. Valentine is Jewish (not that Mary wasn’t, Binnie Kirshenbaum reminds us in her fourth novel, “An Almost Perfect Moment”) and so are most of Valentine’s fellow students at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She may give “The Girls,” her mother’s mah-jongg-playing friends, “the creeps, the way the kid looked as if she knew everything, as if she had imbibed the wisdom of the ages,” but to most observers she seems ordinary, even vacuous, into status and clothes, “a plastic doll with wide eyes painted on and a hollow head.”

Kirshenbaum, whose previous works of fiction include “Hester Among the Ruins” and “On Mermaid Avenue,” has an original voice and, even better, an original sensibility. Parts of “An Almost Perfect Moment” recall the black comedy of Jewish American literature of the ‘50s and ‘60s; we saw the same coziness and corrosiveness in Bruce Jay Friedman’s “A Mother’s Kisses” and in early works by Philip Roth. But Kirshenbaum, with her long, antic, loopy sentences, takes a God’s-eye view of things her predecessors looked at more subjectively. This gives her humor a grim, no-nonsense quality. It also helps her persuade us to see Valentine as a typical, contemporary girl and, just possibly, as the real deal, the Virgin herself.

If God is in the details and God is love, then Kirshenbaum, evoking Brooklyn in the age of disco, must love that place and time, when American prosperity was beginning to soothe Jews’ anguish over the Holocaust. She certainly loves the details: the streaked hair; the pre-engagement rings; the gold lame pantsuits; the half-traditional, half-modern wisdom dispensed by The Girls to Valentine’s mother, Miriam (who still yearns hopelessly for Valentine’s father, a philandering rat who left her years ago), and the way the very air of school hallways seems electric with social treachery and humid with lust.

Many of the details are silly, of course, but Kirshenbaum is gentle with The Girls. They are good people. Miriam, who consoles herself with sweets, weighs 273 pounds, but pain hasn’t deformed her soul. This, we’re led to understand, is an achievement worthy of respect.

Other characters aren’t so good -- or so lucky, which in Kirshenbaum’s universe may be the same thing. Two of Valentine’s teachers, John Wosileski and Joanne Clarke, are lonely and sad. It isn’t John’s fault that he grew up in poverty, is painfully shy and looks like a pig. Nor is it Joanne’s fault that she is saddled with caring for her senile father or that virulent acne scarred her face.

People should be nicer to them, but Kirshenbaum is typically blunt about why they aren’t: “Everybody shuns life’s losers, the weak, the unattractive, the poor, the dispossessed, the friendless, and not because we want to be cruel, but because we can’t bear the responsibility of them; they need more than we can give; we will fail them.”

John and Joanne could love each other, but they don’t. Each, with the perverse pride of the loser, views the other as a consolation prize and recoils. John is infatuated with Valentine, and Joanne, whose soul is being deformed, can’t resist hating the girl. Valentine briefly has a crush on John -- she joins the school ski club just because he’s one of its advisors -- and when she shows up at his dingy apartment one day and offers herself, he’s too caught up in his needs, and too little aware of hers, to refuse as he should. We understand him, we sympathize, but what he does is still a crime. “If this had happened in, say, 1995 ... John Wosileski would’ve been crucified.”

Not that John does very much. When Valentine becomes pregnant, it promises to be the nearest thing to a virgin birth we can imagine. The school sends her home. Miriam mourns her daughter’s lost opportunities; The Girls rally around her. Everyone views the situation as a tragedy -- except Valentine, who refuses to name her baby’s father and carries it to term with unfathomable serenity. The ending of “An Almost Perfect Moment” is freighted with allegory and is a bit too abrupt. It is, in fact, the least perfect moment of the novel. Kirshenbaum may have been trapped in her high concept: Having given a realistic story an extra, religious dimension, she may have found herself unable to wind it up without leaving the earthy, plausible ‘70s world that her detailing, and her love, already have made divine enough.