Scotland on Sunday // The Best Thing That Can Happen To a Croissant by Pablo Tusset

Sleazy sleuth sets out on mystery trail
Canongate, £10.99

By Andrew Ervin

IN HIS debut novel, Spanish author Pablo Tusset takes a long hard look at the mystery novel tradition, and gives it both the thumbs-up and the middle finger.

This is a whodunnit for people who generally cannot stand whodunnits. You know the basic formula: a crime gets committed early on and a world-weary sleuth follows a trail of blindingly obvious clues, finds a bit of romance along the way and eventually uncovers a terrible secret before saving the day.

But Pablo Miralles makes an unlikely hero. He is fat, lazy, moody, gluttonous, horny and pretty much constantly drunk or high on hashish. "A detective’s job is never as easy as it looks," he tells us. "You have to ask the right questions, naturally, but you also have to know how to interpret the answers, and my syllogistic intelligence tends to be stymied by an excess of imagination, such that as soon as I arrive at the only possible answer to an enigma, I immediately think up another 25 possibilities that get in the way."

Thirtysomething Miralles is the son of a wealthy businessman. His younger, more straight-laced brother got himself mixed up with some shady characters and has gone missing. His investigative methods differ from those of, say, Sherlock Holmes. He counts hookers among his expenses.

"Seriously flabbergasted, I tried to make some sense out of my thoughts - I had been reading for three hours straight, smoking one joint after another, not to mention the Cardhu-and-aspirin breakfast. I reread, at random, some verses in an attempt to find the trap, but my English is exclusively contemporary, and as soon as something sounds vaguely like Laurence Olivier doing Hamlet, it’s instantly medieval to me."

As he closes in on his brother’s keepers, he enlists a few friends, including an "Irish metaphysic suffering from a severe hangover, a German techie and a Chinese philologist specialising in medieval English literature". With their help he unlocks a website containing a long poem supposedly written in the Middle Ages, which makes strange references to late-20th century linguistic theory. That site also has some connection to a strange building in Miralles’s neighbourhood - one that may or may not house a secret society.

One long virtuosic section takes place in a whorehouse after Miralles finds its number stored in his brother’s mobile phone. A hooker named Beatrice gives him a tour of the facility, which is laid out to mimic the structure of Dante’s Inferno. The activity becomes more explicit the further he descends underground.

Tusset effectively takes all the hackneyed tropes of the noir story and, with a bit of irony, philosophical introspection and sheer pluck, turns them into something hugely entertaining. As both homage and parody, this book may very well be in a position to help revitalise the mystery novel tradition.

Washington Post Book World // Fiction

Tales of disappearing fathers and young adults drunk on capitalism.
By Andrew Ervin

Desperate Alum
In Home Land (Picador; paperback, $13), Sam Lipsyte's first-person narrator is a sharp-tongued, not entirely lovable loser, Lewis "Teabag" Miner. Teabag's problem isn't that his contemporaries misunderstand him -- it's that they understand him all too well as a result of the rude, rambling updates he sends to the alumni newsletter at his New Jersey high school. The locker room abuse he suffered back in those days -- there's no need to dwell on his nickname -- apparently left some serious emotional scars and further damaged Teabag's already shaky psyche. And his confused, semi-erotic memories about his dead mother aren't helping matters. His reminiscences flip-flop in tone between cruelty and hilarity, and in that motion Lipsyte has created a character both unforgettable and unforgivable.

Home Land is not an easy novel to review: The problem does not lie in spending so much time in Teabag's miserable company or even in trying to describe the fine, amazingly subtle emotional shifts that Lipsyte manages to convey. Instead, it comes from the impossibility of finding a representative sentence that could be safely quoted in a family newspaper. Please understand that I mean this as a compliment: In Home Land, Lipsyte has raised crudity to a new level of literary expression. The closest aesthetic I can think of is that of punk rock, especially in the ability to find catharsis in degradation. (At one point Teabag sports the T-shirt of a punk band, Anal Jihad.) But it also maintains the ability to make us laugh as the story builds toward the inevitable class reunion.

In Teabag Lipsyte has created a character so unsympathetic that it's impossible to take much of an interest in his well-being, but also one tortured enough and, most devastatingly, familiar enough that we can't turn our backs on him either. If you pick up Home Land, I suspect that you won't put it down until you've read the whole thing. But whether you will enjoy it as much as I did will depend on your tolerance for the profane.

Royal Demons
My Life as Emperor (Hyperion East, $24.95; translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt), originally published more than a decade ago by the Chinese author Su Tong, also features a narrator looking back on a troubled childhood. As the elderly Duanbei recalls his ascension to the throne of Xie at age 14, he contemplates the personal and political turmoil that followed his coronation. Duanbei's shaky grip on sanity makes him a particularly compelling figure, and you will see his shifting mental states reflected in the lush atmospheres Su Tong conjures at every turn. He is haunted by small creatures no one else can see:

"In order to avoid the demons' harassment," he explains, "I took the unprecedented step of having two serving girls sleep with me, one on each side, and two more strum zithers and sing softly at the foot of the bed. Once the little white demons had slipped away, the rain stopped falling, leaving behind only water dripping weakly off of the eaves onto the banana leaves. The fragrance of the girls lying beside me merged with the stench of rotting vegetation and dying insects beyond the window, eternal smells in the Xie Empire."

Though this novel looks like historical fiction, it isn't confined to any specific epoch -- except, of course, that it's set in the pre-communist days of royal courts and imperial warfare. That timelessness, coupled with translator Howard Goldblatt's balanced economy of language, lends the novel a fairytale quality. But Su Tong brings many other influences to bear on his story. One section calls to mind the brutal road trip of Fortress Besieged, Qian Zhongshu's masterpiece of 20th-century Chinese literature. And many will look for meaning in Duanbei's obsession with joining a circus and becoming a tightrope walker. The abyss he eventually learns to traverse holds those childhood demons, and watching him cross is a profoundly enjoyable experience.

Absent Fathers
If postmodernism taught us anything, it was the need to look beyond the confines of realism and embrace the artifice behind every work of art. These days, many young authors are relying on the conventions of fantasy and Lewis Carroll-like high jinks. Among them is Dean Bakopoulos, whose Please Don't Come Back From the Moon (Harcourt, $23) is a delightful debut novel. In it a combination of different ingredients, including raw literary talent and a sprinkling of magical realism, form the kind of story that I suspect people will be talking about in book clubs and sharing with neighbors.

The men of blue-collar Maple Rock, Mich., begin to leave in droves. "'We're going to the moon,' they'd say, walking away from us. 'I'll be on the moon,' they'd say, their eyes staring through us." They leave wives and children -- most notably our hero, Michael Smolij -- behind to rebuild their lives. It's a strange and beautiful concept, and the exodus seems to accentuate Mikey's depression, becoming just one more of the difficulties that he faces -- girl troubles, possible alcoholism and other coming-of-age stuff -- as we watch him grow up over the span of a few hundred fast-turning and often brilliantly accomplished pages.

Each of Bakopoulos's chapters could stand alone, and I suspect that's due to the emergence of graduate writing programs as the publishing industry's minor-league system. The now voguish, novel-in-stories results from the university peer-review system that requires the accumulation of small, short story-sized chunks of text into a saleable product. (Been there.) But in this case, the stories combine into a Bildungsroman that is also clever, unusual and exciting.

Troubled Siblings
Likewise, Kelly Braffet's Josie and Jack (Mariner; paperback, $13) draws heavily on the folklore tradition, starting with an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm, and the author finds enough inspiration in the darker side of those myths to imbue her story with genuine creepiness.

Though not a horror novel in the traditional sense, Josie and Jack is frequently horrifying, an extended riff on the theme of "Hansel and Gretel" that, like that tale, uses the loss and abuse of innocence to strike fear.

The monster here, Jack, who is in his late teens, lives with his younger sister, Josephine, in a spooky old house outside a small, western Pennsylvania town. Their father is an eccentric and conniving college professor who leaves them for days at a time to their own troublesome devices. Their mother killed herself years earlier. Portrayed from Josie's perspective, the siblings' unhealthy relationship becomes the centerpiece of a disturbing tragedy of manners in which any number of cultural taboos get broken like cheap plates in a Greek restaurant. The exact nature of their bond, and the extent of Jack's insanity become clear only as Josie follows him to live among the big, bad wolves of New York City. The strangers she meets, however vicious, are rarely as brutal as her own supposedly loving family.

Vodka Punk
Finally, one more debut, Give Me (Songs for Lovers) (Simon & Schuster, $19.95; translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield), by Russian author Irina Denezhkina. She began composing these stories a few years ago, as a 19-year-old college student. In posting them online, she unleashed a new strain of samizdat literature, but not much of value stays underground for long. Like some of the better bloggers in this country, Denezhkina quickly gained attention and ended up with a book deal. The popularity of Give Me earned it a nomination for Russia's 2002 National Bestseller prize.

The many characters here -- mostly teenagers drunk on capitalism and cheap vodka -- quickly become indistinguishable in a haze of unmotivated sex and punk music and school examinations. Giving Denezhkina the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's the point here: When Western clothes and music videos finally arrived, the teens didn't become less conformist but perhaps more so, in the face of that so-called freedom.

At times the author seems content to sit back and report on her generation's sarcasm and ennui. "Anton and his friends got drunk, smoked grass, then someone would shoot up and they'd use the same needle to pierce another hole in Anton's ear. And not only Anton's, of course. Then Gesha, a master tattoo artist, would get involved. A great life, really. Lots of fun." Denezhkina fully understands the disenfranchisement of her generation, and she has enough talent and sense at her disposal to act as its ambassador. •

Andrew Ervin is a frequent reviewer for Book World.