Sheila Heti’s debut novel, “Ticknor” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages, $18), has many appeals, all of them literary. The self-looping pleasures of a confused, modern narrator sit surprisingly well with the more sedate pleasures of the 19th-century setting.

Ms. Heti’s narrator, Ticknor, is based on George Ticknor, a Boston Brahmin who, in the mid-19th century, founded the hitherto neglected study of Spanish Literature.The mind of Ms. Heti’s narrower, fictional Ticknor bends not on Spain but on his childhood friend, W.H. Prescott, author of “The Conquest of Mexico.”The book’s short narrative shuttles back and forth across a slim band of hope and resentment, sparked by Ticknor’s ambivalence about his friend’s mounting success. No matter how much Prescott suffers – the loss of his parents, apoplexy – he remains the congenial host,Ticknor the grudging guest. “His equanimity and cheerfulness are invincible,”Ticknor concludes.

Ms. Heti, whose previous book of short stories was published in 2002 by McSweeney’s, has here devised a narrative voice that alternates between the first and second persons. “I read what I found and it was for fun,” Ticknor recalls of his childhood, only to rejoinder himself: “You read mostly for idle pleasure.”And then he follows up: “It is not my fault if I was not an erudite boy. Other boys had books and other boys had libraries.” “No,” he counters himself, “the whole country lacked books then.”

This effect produces a warm, familial feeling; it reveals Ticknor mothering himself, divisively and tragically but also plausibly. A bachelor, he seems to be keeping himself company. The tones of the first and second persons are not simply encouraging or discouraging. They are in fact cooperative, making the same point, first frankly or cruelly and then with softened resignation.

“No one is eagerly awaiting you now,” he says to himself, “Your arrival is not anticipated with any great longing.” And in the first person, he agrees with his second self: “If I am late it will be nothing to anyone.” When Ticknor qualifies his voice further, as if to avoid hurting a third party’s feelings, he seems to have in mind Prescott himself, the source and the divine hearer of all his self-tutting.

However tedious this sounds in review, it is strong on the page. Ms. Heti also wields a broad time-spanning voice:

What is the point in pretending now? The world is as foursquare as my room. I left their walk and pulled myself through the rain-dark streets, so lost I forgot my name. When at last I looked up I found it all impassive and I stopped.

Along with the pop-song resolution of “What is the point in prentending?” and the very contemporary sound of “I found it all impassive,” comes the Homeric “rain-dark streets” and the sound, conservative emphasis of “foursquare.” “Ticknor” is one of this year’s most enjoyable and formally impressive books.

***

A plot summary of Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s debut novel, “Fireworks” (Alfred A. Knopf, 292 pages, $23.95), would foreground a dead child and an absent wife.Though these problems sit at the back of Hollis Clayton’s mind, they hardly run it.

As shown in numerous flashbacks, Hollis was hapless long before he met his wife, and if the summer that the novel covers is particularly disastrous, it is only the apotheosis of a lifelong frittering.When Hollis forgets things – the dog in the car, to lock the kitchen door, to tie up the boat – he does so with genius. A “non-writing writer,” he blows off a meeting with his publishers, inventing along the way an absurd project he has not actually begun, only to begin it and to climb out of his rut.

Hollis could be a forgettable writerly character, a writer’s writer proud to drink and absentmindedly digress, but for Ms.Winthrop’s disarming style. She puts Hollis to the reader. Off-hand, point-blank, Hollis announces that he and his friends are “in a pinball machine,” in a dream. He imagines suffocating: “what air you have left reminds you of the air you don’t have, of the air you used to have. Maybe losing your mind is like that, too.”

Whereas many authors seem to hold the reader’s hand when actually they are holding their character’s, Ms. Winthrop believes in her character’s thinking.

In one instance, Hollis tells his friend Sal a story in which a bartender stands bereft behind his bar, after a nacho theft. After telling his flat-footed story, Hollis stands, behind his hedge – like the bartender, though he doesn’t say so. Much later, Hollis writes the story into his fiction, and notices:

And it’s funny, because the way I’ve got myself, standing behind my hedge, is kind of like how I’ve got Crosby, standing behind his bar. And remember I felt sorry for Crosby, that night, standing there like that, which made me wonder if maybe Sal felt sorry for me in the same kind of way.

This is writing that lives up to the way real people think about themselves. Ms. Winthrop will repeat an entire paragraph in a new tense, as Hollis mulls over a memory. Perhaps Hollis himself is an artist of mental restraint: He lets himself go, and waits for his wife. The novel’s end feels nicely inevitable, because it has been working itself out at the back of Hollis’s mind, where his wife is.

blytal@nysun.com