FIRST FICTION

RIVER THIEVES

By Michael Crummey

Houghton Mifflin: 352 pp., $24

“The cemetery ground was hard as flint and the dead were salted with chopped ice in their coffins and kept in a storage room at the fort until graves could be dug in the spring.� In Michael Crummey’s first novel, the harsh details of Newfoundland life in the early 1800s strive toward lyricism: They’re the stanzas around which Crummey organizes this mini-saga of John Peyton and his father and their dealings with the indigenous Beothuks, volatile “Red Indians� famed for painting their bodies the menacing color of blood.

Within this slowly emerging tale, another story unfolds: of the Peytons and their enigmatic housekeeper, Cassie, a woman as devoted to the works of Shakespeare as she is to her own privacy. With this domestic tableau, Crummey, a native Newfoundlander, gives us a taste of the contingency that ruled colonial life with an iron fist: The Peytons’ is a make-do household, devoid of a mother, in which it’s unclear whether John’s father and Cassie are lovers. Similarly, the official policy toward the Beothuks shifts according to changing tides of pragmatism, eventually bringing a captured Indian woman into the Peytons’ home.

There’s a thick aura of melancholy here, as it becomes increasingly clear that the Beothuks’ days are numbered and that the colonists can only blunder in their attempts to variously subdue, make friends with or eradicate the Indians. Hopelessness grows across “River Thieves� like ice crystals on a window. And if this grim, stubbornly disjointed book proceeds with glacial aloofness, it’s all the more noble and mysterious for it.

*

HALF IN LOVE

By Maile Meloy

Scribner: 192 pp., $23

In “A Stakes Horse,� the closing story in this impressive debut collection set mostly in the contemporary West, a woman named Addy confronts the sobering possibility that local thoroughbred races might actually be fixed. Addy’s horse, Rocky, is jockeyed by her ex-husband, whose responses to her suspicions are as impenetrable as the racetrack mystery she suddenly needs to solve: “The fastest doesn’t always win .... Anything can happen out there.�

Throughout these bite-size stories, Maile Meloy has a flair for making uncertainty vivid, for providing oblique answers in the form of startling enigmas and for making the improbable seem palpably real. “Ranch Girl� is narrated by the daughter of a ranch foreman, who muses about her dead-end life on the high plains: “You could leave. Apply to grad school in Santa Cruz and live by the beach. But none of these things seem real.� In “Aqua Boulevard,� a mortality-obsessed Parisian clutches a recently run-over dog while watching his kids cavort at a public pool: “I leaned my head against the green glass, the warm dog still against my chest. I said thank you for my children.� And in “Tome,� when the embittered client of a Montana lawyer takes a Samoan football player hostage, the lawyer must choose between her client and the law and manages, somehow, to choose both.

There’s no big-sky grandeur in “Half in Love�: Meloy’s voice is as unvarnished as her characters and as unadorned as a Montana hillside.

*

THE BOX CHILDREN

By Sharon Wyse

Riverhead: 186 pp., $18.95

The “box children� of Sharon Wyse’s assured first novel are five minuscule dolls kept by 12-year-old Lou Ann Campbell, an avid diarist on the verge of adolescence. In her secret daily entries (her mother’s rule is “Never write anything down because you never know who will see it�), Lou Ann gives us glimpses of life on a sprawling northern Texas farm during the summer of 1960 while chronicling her family as it threatens to unravel: There’s her older brother, with whom she finds herself in a bitter feud; her indulgent father, who has an eye for fast women; and her emotionally wrung-out mother, pregnant again after losing five babies (whose departed souls are represented by Lou Ann’s doll collection).

But as “The Box Children� moves deeper into an unforgiving summer, it zeroes in on Lou Ann’s mother, who rules the farm like a commandant while drinking her way through her pregnancy, terrorizes Lou Ann with outrageously overbearing demands and finally tosses her wayward husband out of the house. It seems that only a new RCA Whirlpool refrigerator-freezer can assuage Mrs. Campbell, but who can assuage Lou Ann’s disintegrating childhood? Wyse’s almanac of a farm summer is an affecting mid-century “Works and Days,� a pastoral ode in which the annual harvest, for one Texas girl, reaps much more than wheat.