Fiction's Travels

First novels are supposed to be thinly veiled autobiographies, but only one of this season's debuts looks to be just that: n+1 founder Keith Gessen's "All the Sad Young Literary Men" (Viking, April), about writers wishing they had something other than their own personal lives — something international, even world-historical — to write about.

Almost everyone else in this commercial category — hot debut novelist — has simply gone ahead and written about the world-historical. Sadie Jones, with "The Outcast" (Knopf, March), may be one of the more subtle, imagining the life of a young English boy whose mother dies just as his unfamiliar father comes home from World War II. At the other, supercharged end of the spectrum, Mohammed Hanif's "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" (Knopf, May) takes the assassination of General Zia — rival of the Bhutto clan — as the occasion for a farcical novel of the Pakistani air force. More soberly, Saša Stanišic's "How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone" (Grove, June) offers a Bosnian refugee's meditation on his sheltered childhood — before it was destroyed by ethnic warfare and eventual immigration to Germany. Also from a German, Michael Kleeberg's "The King of Corsica" (Other Press, May) offers a Barry Lyndon picaresque, reminding us that once upon a time, sad young men could parlay their dreams into actual kingships.

But most international debuts, at least those getting translated, make Mr. Kleeberg look like a privileged fantasist. One of the most promising new books, along with Mr. Hanif's "Exploding Mangoes," is Aravind Adiga's "White Tiger" (April, Free Press), reputed to be the grittiest novel to come out of India for some time. Adiga's protagonist is a disaffected cab driver who takes it upon himself to write to the visiting premier of China and tell him what the real India is like.

Another letter of helpless outrage inspires one of America's most exciting debuts, "Dear American Airlines" (Houghton Mifflin, June), by Jonathan Miles, a book whose conceit — a canceled flight, a man stranded in Chicago — should be enough to win it millions of readers. Mr. Miles's protagonist, Bennie, begins in attack mode, but curls, as he writes on, waiting for his flight, into a deeply penetrating self-examination. Interestingly, Bennie works as a Polish translator, and his father died in a Nazi concentration camp — themes not far from Geoff Herbach's semi-epistolary novel, "The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg" (Three Rivers Press, April), which sends its Jewish protagonist on a quest of self- and parental discovery into Eastern Europe. A blend of mysticism and dark comedy, it may sound familiar, but early reviews are positive.

Most writers seem to agree, all the good material is abroad. Jen Sookfong Lee's saga of Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver, "The End of East" (Vintage, March), tells the story of an immigrant who returned to China often enough to marry and have three subsequent children. Fae Myenne Ng's second novel, "Steer Toward Rock" (Hyperion, May), takes a harder look at the mechanics of immigration, pinning a Chinese-Californian family's fate on double-dealings with the INS.

Rivka Galchen's highly anticipated "Atmospheric Disturbances" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May) involves a trip to South America but, unlike most big debuts, it's primarily a psychological journey. There are notably three big novels with therapist-heroes this spring, the other two being Siri Hustvedt's "The Sorrows of an American" (Henry Holt, April) and Patrick McGrath's "Trauma" (Knopf, April).

Of all these eye-catching debuts, the only one that takes on the American landscape — not counting O'Hare — is the work of a Scottish playwright. "Missy" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June), by Chris Hannan, re-imagines the American West through the eyes of a hooker with a crate of opium.

If Mr. Gessen's "All the Sad Young Literary Men" looks futile or narcissistic at first glance, it should be admitted that it has apparently nailed its material: Most young people now want to write about war and strife, the farther away the better.

Other fiction to keep an eye out for this season: the collections "Unaccustomed Earth: Stories" by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, April) and "Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories" by Tobias Wolff (Knopf, March), and the novels "Breath" by Tim Winton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May), "Lavinia" by Ursula K. Le Guin (Knopf, April), "The Stone Gods" by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt, April), "Peace" by Richard Bausch (Knopf, April), and "Plague of Doves" by Louise Erdrich (Harper, April).

blytal@nysun.com