FIRST FICTION

The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

A Novel

Steve Amick

Pantheon: 384 pp., $25

For his first book, Steve Amick has chosen a location comfortably off the beaten path: the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where the “short reedy squiggle” of the (fictional) Oh-John-Ninny River connects the village of Weneshkeen to the outside world. The last writer to celebrate the charms of rural Michigan with equal panache was probably Ernest Hemingway. But times have changed since Papa tromped through the Northern woods with his shotgun and cable-knit sweater. Modern life has intruded. And the Oh-John-Ninny is now primarily a conduit for obnoxious tourists. The waterway is “used by people with big fancy boats to get inland and gaze on all the cute, tiny, far shabbier boats on whose decks they would never set foot.”

The culture clash between the townies and the outsiders -- “Fudgies,” they’re called, due to their insatiable appetite for Weneshkeen fudge -- is the engine of Amick’s novel. Clearly he favors the local populace. Yet he’s too skilled a writer to stack the deck: The country mice are as mean-spirited as the city mice. Nor does he overlook the multiple ironies of the tourist trade, with its traffic in bogus authenticity. Among the staples of the local economy, after all, are the “sweatshirts that said Weneshkeen, MI and were sewn in Korea, embroidered in California, and featured, over the breast, an algae-dripping moose the likes of which have not been seen in the Lower Peninsula probably since before the Mackinac Bridge was built, back when they would have had to swim the Straits.”

This makes the book sound like a chronicle of class warfare. But what Amick really brings to mind is a post-MTV Garrison Keillor -- there’s that same mixture of affection and deadpan amusement -- and the only moral here is the one repeatedly enunciated by the town sheriff: Don’t be a jackass. Of course, that’s a challenge for several members of the large cast, which includes a melancholic ex-minister, a deputy sheriff with a yen to write for David Letterman and several randy teenagers looking for summer romance. My personal favorite is Roger Drinkwater, a dour Chippewa who considers frowning to be an ancestral mandate: “I’m an Indian. Smiling’s not required.” By the end of this ingratiating ensemble piece, even Roger has changed his mind.

*

The Red Carpet

Bangalore Stories

Lavanya Sankaran

The Dial Press: 216 pp., $23

Add a parent and child to almost any story, and at once you have a generational tug-of-war. The urge to break away -- or at least to fall farther from the tree than your average acorn -- is a fundamental human itch. In this sense, the stories in “The Red Carpet” describe a universal longing. Yet the pace of change has so accelerated in India that parent and child seem to be separated by a sociological abyss, with tradition on one side and chaotic, caffeinated modernity on the other. And nowhere in India is this more pronounced than in high-tech Bangalore, that “potpourri of beggars and billionaires” where Lavanya Sankaran has set most of these tales.

Sankaran, who was educated at Bryn Mawr and employed by a New York investment bank before returning to Bangalore, has surely peered into this abyss herself. In the title story (which ignited a bidding war for this collection after the Atlantic Monthly chose to publish it), she approaches it more obliquely. Raju, a chauffeur for the wealthy young Mrs. Choudhary, is both touched by his employer’s kindness and scandalized by “what he could characterize as nothing other than a Lax Moral Outlook” --which is to say, short skirts and nicotine. Their rapprochement is droll, delicate and just a little predictable: a subcontinental “Driving Miss Daisy.”

In “Bombay This” and “Birdie Num-Num,” however, the author sinks her teeth directly into the generational divide. The former story pits a young software engineer against his scheming mother, a “one-woman marriage-bureau-in-waiting.” The latter finds a young PhD candidate at odds with her scheming mother. And the trench warfare of family life does wonders for Sankaran’s prose: It becomes snappier, inventive with less Britannic mustiness. Her first collection is a mite patchy -- but her second should be worth waiting for.