First novels are usually publishers' unwanted mail: commercially unpromising bundles of print that are accepted grudgingly, paid for in peanuts and advertised sparsely, if at all. The mystery is why any first novels are ever published and why there are any first novelists willing to go through the ordeal of writing them. In spite of the many obstacles, first novels continue to appear. The question for readers is knowing which ones to try. Here is a look at six of them that we think, while not perfect, are worth your time.
A SURVIVOR'S TALE
Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels takes some audacious risks in Fugitive Pieces (Knopf; 294 pages; $23), not the least of them being a brief introductory passage that reveals her novel's conclusion. "Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children."
From this bleak beginning, Michaels plunges into this fictional poet's memories, which he set down in two notebooks in the months before his death. These recollections begin with the event, more than a half-century earlier, that changed his life: the night the Nazi soldiers came to his parents' house in their Polish village. Jakob, then seven, was still small enough to fit into the hiding place behind a wall, but his sister Bella, 15, was not. The aging poet remembers what happened next with understated anguish: "The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father's mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth."
This extraordinarily compressed passage, appearing early in the novel, sets the tone for much that follows. Michaels not only creates an imaginary poet, she also examines the ways in which a poetic imagination can arise out of horror. That Jakob survives at all is a miracle. After days of hiding, he is finally driven by hunger to risk his fate by approaching a stranger. "I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew."
Instead of being shot, he is rescued by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist working on a nearby archaeological project. Athos smuggles the boy out of Poland back to Athos' ancestral island. Although the Nazis arrive there too, Jakob later realizes that he, having experienced the worst, was also spared much more of the same. "While I was living with Athos on Zakynthos, learning Greek and English, learning geology, geography, and poetry, Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space...I didn't know that while I was on Zakynthos, a Jew could be purchased for a quart of brandy, perhaps four pounds of sugar, cigarettes."