A spiritual quest, a self-made heaven, a fall from grace

Misfits, mavericks, fish out of water — whatever you choose to call them, they're a staple of good fiction. The three debut novels below make excellent use of them.

"Save Your Own"
by Elisabeth Brink
Houghton Mifflin, 281 pp., $23

Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg, the narrator of this hilarious and affecting first novel, has brains enough to get into Harvard Divinity School as a post-graduate. And she harbors huge ambitions, evident in her thesis-in-progress which aims at formulating "a new, one-size-fits-all, experience-based, anti-religion religion."

But she has, as she sees it, nothing else going for her — no looks, no confidence, no sex appeal (at 25 she's still a virgin). Her scientist parents are atheists who aren't about to give her the support she needs to explore her interest in the nuts-and-bolts aspects of religious vision. Even her dean at Harvard has doubts about her work on "secular conversion" (non-Christian, life-transforming epiphanies). Indeed, he's threatening to withdraw her scholarship funding.

So what does Gillian do?

Take a job at Responsibility House, a transitional home for "drinkless alcoholics and drugless addicts" who are attempting to rebuild their lives. Gillian's idea is that the life-altering turnarounds of these residents will give her the case histories she needs for her research. But little goes as planned in "Save Your Own."

Elisabeth Brink writes a pleasurably addled prose, whether she's delving into Gillian's convoluted states of mind (which often necessitate lengthy footnotes) or describing "rambling, pukish pink" Responsibility House itself ("An added-on side room had all the allure of a hitchhiker's thumb").

The house's inmates run the gamut from passive and pitiful to manipulative and rebellious. Gillian's confused attempt to win both their respect and their affection, while also maintaining control over them, makes for some lively confrontations.

Brink lends the book a far-reaching, soul-satisfying dimension with her focus on how lives can be transformed by a "vision" or "conversion" (of whatever variety — it could just be a chat with your houseplants). She has a terrific ear for how people reveal their backgrounds and mindsets through their speech. And she has a gift for using small, personal details to tap into big subject matter: the yearning for connection, the need to have a sense of vocation whether you're a scholar, a baker or a housing contractor.

As she wraps things up, Brink resorts to a contrived plot twist or two. But she's clearly a gifted writer with a slant of mind, sense of humor and turn of phrase all her own.

Narrator Jack Diaz, an American volunteer with Potable Water International (PWI), starts making up his own rules almost the minute he arrives in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. When PWI's funding is slashed following 9/11, Jack finds himself half-stranded in a village on the ethnic borderline between the country's Muslim north and Christian south. And that suits him just fine.

He adopts an African name, hunts African game, tills African soil, grows African crops and starts having risky affairs with African women (even as he lectures on the dangers of AIDS, which is raging locally). So smitten is he with the place that he goes to sleep "praying I'd wake in the morning with my skin turned black."

But no matter how strongly he tries to identify his lot with that of his village neighbors, there's no way he can sidestep the fact of his skin-color — especially after civil war erupts.

"Whiteman" draws on Tony D'Souza's years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast. Its prose is straightforward, yet imbued with poetic, sometimes even ecstatic, response to its setting and subject matter. Its wandering narrative line doesn't hurt it. Instead, what seems at first a volume of loosely linked sketches becomes a sequence of stories, each dovetailing into the next, that goes from strength to strength.

D'Souza captures it all: the bitter Muslim-Christian socioeconomic divide of Ivory Coast, the sometimes shocking nature of village justice, the effect on the senses of the place where forest gives way to savanna. He also notes, to scathing effect, the inefficacy of American officials in keeping tabs on what's happening in the country.

The strongest feeling here is of how this patch of Africa mysteriously fits the shape of an experience that seemingly every PWI volunteer desires. "If you want it to mean something," one returnee to the States warns Jack, "don't ever come back."

D'Souza puts this feeling palpably across but doesn't analyze it. Maybe he should in his next book.

"The Catastrophist"
by Lawrence Douglas
Other Press, 275 pp., $24.95

Talk about misfits: Daniel Ben Wellington, the narrator of "The Catastrophist," is a rising academic star who, in one colossal hiccup of missteps, has "harassed his student, fabricated his past, and cheated on and then bloodied his pregnant wife."

And just when things were going so well for him!

After giving us a glimpse of Daniel's disaster and hinting that not all the "facts" about him are true, author Lawrence Douglas takes us to the beginning of his downfall. The result is a satire as savage as it is energetic.

Daniel, a fixture on "the atrocity lecture and conference circuit," is trying to complete a Holocaust-art study that he hopes will make his name. But his wife's surprise pregnancy, he feels, is threatening both his book and his chances at tenure.

His panic is total. He believes he isn't "evolutionarily suited for fatherhood ... mine was a design not worth replicating." Moreover, his fear that a baby will "ruinously disrupt my work was ruinously disrupting my work."

Daniel's wife, known only as "R.," is an inscrutable mix of patience and impatience, cool temper and hot temper (she's mostly self-possessed, but sometimes likes to throw things). And she's well aware Daniel isn't shaping up as a viable father-to-be.

But these are just the beginnings of the marriage's — and book's — complications. The real trouble starts when self-sabotaging Daniel, on a research visit to Berlin, finds himself entering "a zone ungoverned by conventional rules."

Douglas gives unruly life to Daniel's confusions about his wife, his colleagues, his ambitions, his Jewish family background and the hazards of Holocaust memorializing. The supporting players up the dramatic ante with their impulses and eccentricities.

The book's descriptions are both punchy and zany, its dialogue funny and smart. And Daniel's observations can be as rueful as they are accurate. ("What angle of the lip's complex geometry," he asks, "introduces pity into a smile?")

Douglas is an American. But it's British names — Iris Murdoch, Malcolm Bradbury, Michael Frayn — that come to mind as fellow purveyors of his brand of brainy comedy.

He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998 and has published four novels.