First Fiction

Seriously

Lucia Nevai

Little, Brown: 200 pp., $23.95

Lucia NEVAI’s accomplished short fiction has appeared in two previous collections, so it’s no surprise that each chapter of this much-anticipated novel unfolds like a perfect miniature narrative. They’re short stories, really, and each tells of another eccentric resident of the tiny Catskills town of Dustin, N.Y., as seen through the eyes of recent arrival -- and general interloper -- Tamara Johansson.

Tamara, who has various ties to Los Angeles and Chicago, washes up in unmetropolitan Dustin on a mission to convert the local feed store into an art gallery. The ripe subtext of “Seriously� is the gentrification of cute impoverished hamlets that lie beyond the reach of the big cities. In Dustin, we find a middle-aged gay couple determined to turn the doctor’s house into the Do-Ray-Mi bistro and an annoyingly above-average couple from Connecticut earnestly restoring the rundown Dustin Hotel.

The indigenous population, meanwhile, clucks away at these strange creatures. And what an inspired crew they are, the “disenfranchised dribble of humanity that populated the crossroads.� There’s Henry of Henry’s Odds ‘N Ends Antiques Store, hovering around Tamara like a pesky mosquito, and Viola, Tamara’s pal from the luncheonette, who cooks up a disastrous speech on the “early religious life in Minisink County� for the uppity historical society. There’s Dave L. Garson, the artificial inseminator who tends to get creepy in enclosed spaces; Detering, the postal clerk who wields gossip like a horsewhip; and Boz, Dustin’s patrician, who’s carrying on yet another affair, this time with Tamara: “This, not art, was the real business of my life, this slow, riveting revelation of a sexual self,� Tamara tells us. (Or, as her white-trash pal Glorine puts it: “Welcome to the Slut Club!� )

Tamara’s gallery ends up having its effect on Dustin, but Dustin has an even bigger effect on her. After a year, she’s practically gone native, even if her previous life still crowds in: rivalrous sister, dead parents. “Seriously� has its share of darkness (from comas to car wrecks), but Nevai’s prose is like the music of crickets on a clear upstate night.

*

The Misadventures of Maria O’Mara

Deborah Skelly

Riverhead: 272 pp., $14 paper

“The Misadventures of Maria O’Mara,� a first novel from former William Morris talent agent Deborah Skelly, is exactly what you’d want in your carry-on bag for a flight between LAX and JFK. That is, unless you have qualms about guffawing like a donkey in front of strangers.

In recent years, the corporate-nightmare saga has become something of a shopworn genre, with no end of cubicled fashion magazine assistants, wannabe screenwriters trapped in big-studio hell and, yes, even aspiring agents discovering that, egad, Hollywood is more about backstabbing and Scientology than Art. What makes Skelly’s entry into this crowded field so refreshing is how much she refuses to take anything seriously, even as her narrator, agent Maria O’Mara, parcels out Big Truths about life: “When you think you come from nowhere all you have is the manufactured self.� “Labor is for little men below Fiftieth Street selling bird acts.� “My own perversity contravenes the natural order of things. I am an agent. I like the chase.�

The chase is cruel, Maria discovers. She’s not immune to the occasional “bad face day� or nagging questions about her chosen path: “Why do they all have to be so mean? So Armani?� The widespread “patina of superficiality� adheres to Maria herself as she craftily -- and thanklessly -- scores $2 million for an idiotic pitch (“a naked man runs across the city�) and pursues an uninvigorating relationship with one Harris Schwartzman. Harris is an odious, self-hating jerk who thinks his career as a producer of reality TV makes him a journalist. It’s an enduring mystery why Maria gets mixed up with him, although it might have to do with Maria’s dwindling supply of fertile ova.

Maria’s misadventures aren’t in the same league as “The Day of the Locust� or “The Bonfire of the Vanities,� of course, but they do rival the deadpan desperation of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.� With any luck, maybe Skelly will never eat lunch in L.A. or New York again.