Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision” (Random House, 241 pages, $21.95) is one of this year’s best debut novels. It is definitely in the tradition of debuts, concerning a young man running simultaneously to and from love, while selling a new kind of irony that Mr. Kunkel’s contemporaries will appreciate and his elders might love or reject.

Dwight Wilmerding suffers from indecision, which Mr. Kunkel portrays in cartoon fashion – Dwight has coin-flipping rituals and he keeps to-do lists of decisions to be made. In many ways, though, his dawdling is typical: He doesn’t want to define his relationship with his girlfriend, Vaneetha, and he fancies a move from Manhattan to Vermont but never makes it. And he in fact makes rash decisions – he goes to Ecuador to visit a high school crush and takes Abulinix, an experimental cure for indecision, hoping it will make his “consciousness so acute that life would just describe itself to me as it took place, and merely to open my mouth would render me the tribune of articulate events.”

But Dwight is already the most articulate first-person narrator you will read this fall. Indecision is his straw man, and his real problem – if he has one – is that describing life is more fun than participating. His narration is self-conscious: At Thanksgiving, his mother presents “an enormous golden colored tofurkey, or tofu turkey, as what I guess you would call the piece de resistance.”

Like most of us, Dwight’s thoughts are removed from reality. His descriptions always build in vagueness. “I found him sympathetically reminiscent of something too basic and also vague to be identified,” he says of a native guide. “I’d kind of lost track of my mood,” he says with paradoxical self-awareness.

The word “this” often emphasizes and excuses the brilliant leap Mr. Kunkel makes from thing to description: “Along with the morning time coolness there was also something new in the air: this slight kind of back-to-school tightness.” Mr. Kunkel also makes a case for filler phrases like “sort of” and “somehow”:

Always the same, the smell of the house was always a surprise: cool and somehow mineral, with a sort of iron flatness beneath the pleading richness of dark wood and moist sense of venerable rugs.

This is a send-up of wine connoisseurship, but it also functions as a sincere stab at description. Mr. Kunkel redoubles the sarcasm of satirists, making the ridiculous lingo of America his own, shruggingly. He shrugs with somehows. In excess they would cloy, but balanced against Mr. Kunkel’s verbal performance, they aren’t.

Mr. Kunkel’s narrative arc is vehicular; though “Indecision” is a novel of self-examination, Dwight is basically blithe. His verbal brilliance does animate the plot, but his images also have a disposable quality: “There were zero clouds, and the air seemed tall with clarity – it was that variety of day.” The image explains itself and then shuffles offstage. Dwight wants to be liked, above all, and he will be.

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Percival Everett is not a writer’s writer. He is worldly, and also experimental. Last year he published “A History of the African-American People [Proposed] By Strom Thurmond, As Told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid [a Novel].” Not the farce of history you might expect, it was an epistolary novel about publishing and petty egos, in which a haywire aide tries to buffalo Mr. Everett & Co. into ghostwriting a Thurmond-approved history. His 2001 novel, “Erasure,” described a highbrow professor and writer who, in financial straits, writes a street novel satire “about the Black experience” titled “My Pafology.”

These satires are as obvious as they are obscure. Mr. Everett’s new novel, by contrast, is a relaxation. “Wounded” (Graywolf, 207 pages, $23) takes place in Wyoming, among blizzards and in view of a red desert. John Hunt, an educated, even-tempered black rancher who enjoys the subtlety of horse training, makes a compelling guide to the ethical potluck of his isolated community.

Mr. Everett eventually launches a plot about hate crimes, but the first part of the novel, which develops Hunt’s character, overshadows these newspaper-size doings. Hunt’s quirkiness – “The day had turned hot and the street felt like steaming food” – manifests its humanity when he speaks to his animals. “‘I don’t know,’ I said to her, ‘this might make you a cannibal, a dog eating a hot dog.'”

The wonderful thing about Westerns is their capacity for self-consciousness. “I felt my body melt and immediately the horse relaxed,” Hunt says. Cowboy superstition gives narcissism a green light: “Unfortunately, my taking it as a sign meant that we were in for a dumping, my guesses about weather were almost always misguided.” In “Wounded,” Mr. Everett’s worldly satire becomes natural, nurtured by a small-town sense of humor.