FIRST FICTION

Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue

A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music

Mark Kurlansky

Ballantine: 322 pp., $24.95

Mark KURLANSKY is famous for his savory works of nonfiction, including “Cod” and “Salt.” To be sure, he has dipped his toe into fiction once before, with a 2000 collection of stories called “The White Man in the Tree.” But “Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue” marks his first full-body immersion in the form. And this hefty novel -- a chronicle of clashing appetites, with a dozen artery-clogging recipes -- turns out to be an addictive read.

Which isn’t to say that Kurlansky has hung up his reportorial shoes. “Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue” is very much about a particular time and place: the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the summer of 1988, when both the Mets and Michael Dukakis seemed bound for glory. The author delivers his period detail with obvious relish. We learn about the stratification of Jews, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and yuppies. There are small, scintillating lessons in music, cuisine, urban history. And Kurlansky, like almost every inhabitant of the Lower East Side, wears his politics on his sleeve: “The long nightmare of the monster with the Disney smile was about to be over. Michael Dukakis, whoever he was, had the simple task of being better than Ronald Reagan.”

Still, what’s at the heart of the book is human behavior -- or misbehavior. The protagonist, middle-aged Nathan Seltzer, is messing up. He’s tempted to sell his funky copy shop to a heartless corporate type, thereby betraying the mom-and-pop ethos of the old neighborhood. He’s cheating on his wife with Karoline, a delectable pastry chef -- a double betrayal, since her father may well have been an ardent Nazi. And despite his flirtations with “the cleansing but unexciting spirit of reform,” he can’t seem to straighten out. The crooked path is much more fun.

Nathan, who’s less effervescent than his name suggests, is tormented by guilt. The rest of the large, multiethnic cast has little time for such agonies: They’re sensualists, with a yen for fine wine, Irving Berlin, ripe tomatoes. Perhaps the author draws too neat a distinction between hedonism and Talmudic hairsplitting. Now and again he also gets too cute on us, too sweet. Yet these are minor flaws in a smart, funny, formidable novel. Let’s hope that Kurlansky has more deep-dish fiction on the way.

*

Snow White and Russian Red

A Novel

Dorota Maslowska

Translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff

Black Cat: 294 pp., $13 paper

According to the publisher, Dorota Maslowska’s debut novel has already hit the bestseller lists in Poland and Germany. If this is true, then experimental fiction is in better shape than we all thought. For “Snow White and Russian Red” is so corrosive, so extreme in its nightmarish subjectivity, as to be almost reader-proof -- it feels like something William S. Burroughs might have written after getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

Why read it, then? Not for the plot, which revolves around a Polish slacker named Andrzej “Nails” Robakoski, who’s trying to erase the memory of his ex-girlfriend with big helpings of speed, Tylenol and sex. No, the drawing card here is the prose. The 21-year-old author has already patented her own blend of brutality and poetic insight. And although comedy is most often what gets lost in translation, Benjamin Paloff seems to have done right by Maslowska: The book is often very funny.

Andrzej whines, snorts his speed, then whines some more. Along the way, he offers some sardonic snapshots of Polish life, including an anti-Russian rally: “Grill smoke has utterly engulfed the town, sacrifices of kielbasa, ribs, and animal cartilage submitted to the gods in the name of victory over the partitioners.” But he’s even better at dispatching the other characters in economical slivers of language: “She starts to cry, which looks rather unspectacular, a little TV.”

None of this really compensates for the long stretches of tedium, and the tricky conclusion -- in which the author-as-character types up Andrzej’s arrest report in a provincial police station -- doesn’t help matters. Still, Maslowska has the makings of a substantial talent, one that might better thrive outside the confines of the postmodernist fun house.