First Fiction

Faithful

Davitt Sigerson

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 216 pp. $23.95

Davitt Sigerson was, at various times, the president, chief executive and chairman of Polydor, Chrysalis and Island records. His first novel has nothing to do with the music industry. Nothing, that is, until you wonder where all the anger comes from. “Faithful,” a forceful little head-butt of a book, seethes with rage as it fixates upon betrayal and sex -- lots of sex. We’ve all heard those cliches about the record business: rapacious, backstabbing, decadent. It’s as if Sigerson has injected these onerous industry hallmarks directly into the private life of Nick Clifford, his honest, decent and loving hero, a trader on the London Stock Exchange.

When Sigerson’s cruel dosage hits Nick’s bloodstream, all hell breaks loose. He’s rapturously in love with his dreamy new bride, Trish, an airline exec. Then we see her engaging in scatological fun with a random stranger during a Frankfurt layover. Major red flag. But soon Trish is pregnant and the happy couple plan for a baby -- until Trish’s ex, a smug Hugh Grant type named Joe, carts her off.

“Faithful” has a Mel Gibson-sized appetite for martyrdom. Nick is the crucified modern male, and the entire feminine cosmos has it in for him. The woman he adores -- her belly button is “the celestially registered trademark of the only thing he’ll ever want” -- and his beloved first-born, Charlotte, are in the household of an utter git. There’s nothing Nick can do, except fool around with Trish on the sly.

At times, the voice of “Faithful” suggests an unholy union of “The Office’s” fatuous David Brent and the Harold Brodkey of “Innocence,” the infamous short story that evoked a 1950s Harvard coed’s first orgasm. But who can resist Sigerson’s masterful manipulations? We want to watch Nick writhe to the very last, soaking up his every simpering justification and ineffectual outburst. In the end, Nick’s love for baby Charlotte is both his redemption and his purgatory, and we’re left feeling much like Nick himself: “Lust and wonder and regret are the commodities on my exchange, and I understand them less than ever.”

*

The Importance of a Piece of Paper

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Grove Press: 226 pp. $22

In Jimmy Santiago Baca’s haunting story collection, intricate family dramas -- of love, hate, history and race -- play out against the luminous, wide-open backdrop of New Mexico. Baca has written several volumes of poetry, and these debut stories are redolently, lyrically, evocative of their setting: There are almost always green chiles on the stove or fresh tortillas being prepared, cottonwood trees or scraggly ravines within view, Virgens de Guadalupe to be beseeched.

But what’s most colorful here is the diverse array of New Mexicans who populate these pages -- Latino, white or black -- and how their lives are endlessly bound up in the place.

In “The Three Sons of Julia,” a happily anticipated Fourth of July reunion turns ugly when two estranged brothers, one a striving investment banker and the other a tattooed jailbird, finally come to blows. “Mother’s Ashes” finds an odious, sex-addicted lawyer fraternizing with crystal-meth-dealing bikers and, improbably, attempting to dispose of the incinerated remains of a would-be client’s mother. “Runaway” is the affecting tale of an orphan from the St. Anthony Boy’s Home who witnesses the horrid predations of a cruel priest and stages daring escapes to comfort his infirm grandmother. In “Bull’s Blood,” a couple separated by age and race consummate their love with an impromptu sacramental rite: quaffing the warm blood of a bull recently done in by a matador.

And in the title story (the best in the collection), two siblings scramble to save the family’s land after their well-heeled brother puts his share up for sale. It’s a miniature saga, brimming with agonizing twists of fate, interracial romance, class antagonism, possible murder, a hunt for the mythic original Spanish land grant and a salty cast befitting a John Sayles film.

Throughout, Baca’s prose remains as light-saturated and unsentimental as the rugged terrain -- both geographical and human -- that “The Importance of a Piece of Paper” charts with cartographical precision.