Julie Otsuka, _The Buddha in the Attic_

HOW MANY FIRST-PERSON-PLURAL novels are out there these days? The only one I've read is Jeffery Eugenides's Virgin Suicides; a cursory search reveals that apparently Kate Walbert, Joshua Ferris, and Ed Park have taken shots at it as well. (Ayn Rand's Anthem, let's agree, does not count.)

The Buddha in the Attic is not alone, then, but I would nonetheless say first-person-plural narration was a particularly canny call on Otsuka's part; it suits her subject matter perfectly. The novel is about the "picture brides," the Japanese women who made long-distance marriage arrangements with the Japanese immigrant men who were working in California, Oregon, and Washington state. These women, the novel's "we," crossed the Pacific and managed to make lives in the USA until the catastrophe of the internment camps.

So described, the novel sounds like one of those multi-family, multi-generational doorstops that requires a set of family trees on the end papers -- a Japanese Joy Luck Club, say. But it's a slender volume -- 129 pages -- in which a development that might have been four or five chapters in a saga turns into a few sentences. Infants become young adults, marriages struggle through incomprehension to reconciliation, small businesses rise and fall in a matter of a few pages. Names are few.

The book feels as though hundreds of sagas are unscrolling simultaneously, each flickering by in a few seconds. Some of the sagas are a bit sentimental or obvious, and one is not that sorry to see them disappear so quickly, but others are all the more poignant for their brevity.

Perhaps too off-beat to become a classic, but I can imagine this becoming a book-club standard, or a high school English standard -- unorthodox though it is, it has an insistent pull of a new kind.

Amy Gerstler and David Lehman, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2010_

HERE I AM a year behind again, but this one was well worth reading once I got around to it -- the best since Heather McHugh's, I think. A very broad spectrum of publications represented, nice mix of the conventional and not-at-all conventional, some great old hands and some intriguing work by names new to me. Among the latter: Mark Bibbins, Peter Davis, Gabriel Gudding, Dolly Lemke, Camille Norton, Gregory Pardlo. Mr. Gudding apparently has published a 436-page poem with Dalkey Archive. Dalkey Archive, how I love you!

David Mitchell, _Black Swan Green_

A CURVEBALL (or googly?) from Mitchell, heretofore given to razzle-dazzle in his fiction, as Black Swan Green is a relatively straightforward coming of age story, set in a small town in the southern part of England in 1982, the year of the Falklands War.

Jason Taylor, the narrator, is thirteen, and faces the quintessential dilemma of thirteen-year-olds in the western world: are you one of the cool kids who can seemingly get away with anything, one of the large mass of the nondescript who blend in and manage to avoid the worst kinds of trouble, or one of the persecuted preterite singled out for the torments of the damned? As a stammerer (like Mitchell, according to interviews), Jason is at graver-than-usual risk of falling into the third category. Quick-witted and capable of bravery, he gets a shot at joining the local gang, which would make him a cool kid, but he loses that opportunity when he chooses to stand by a friend who disastrously failed the initiation (good for you, Jace). From then on, he is increasingly in the sights of the King Bully, and things go from bad to worse to even worse.

Pluck (in shop class, Jason crushes the expensive calculator of one of the bullies in a vise, thus getting the authorities' attention while also demonstrating nerve) and luck (he finds the King Bully's lost wallet at the fair) win Jason a degree of redemption; there's also the fact that the bullies don't grow up to write the books. A conversation with Mme. Crommelynk, whom we met in very different circumstances in Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, helps Jason discern a vocation as a writer.

Ordinarily, I'm disappointed when someone who successfully writes the more adventurous kinds of fiction decides to play it straight, but Mitchell is so good at it that I could only marvel and enjoy. The holiday verbal death match between Jason's father and his uncle... the three teenaged girls emerging from a photo booth singing Duran Duran's "Hungry Like a Wolf"... the perfect counterpointing of the Falklands War with the contest of wills between Jason's parents... all the NYTBR and New Republic folks wishfully scanning the horizon for a great contemporary version of 19th century realism should be looking right here.

Steve Stern, _The Frozen Rabbi_

A nerdish teenaged Jewish boy living in Memphis, searching his family's deep freeze for a piece of liver in which to masturbate á la Alex Portnoy, discovers a frozen Hasidic rabbi. Alternating chapters in Stern's wonderful novel lay out (a) how the frozen rabbi wound up in a suburban Memphis deep freeze and (b) what happened when he was thawed out.

Stern's evocations of a century of Jewish milieus (and a century of slow assimilation) are brilliant, especially thanks to his unequalled gift for the depiction of luftmenschen. The novel's comic/satiric vein -- the thawed rabbi opens a New-Age-ish spirituality center and more or less immediately succumbs to temptations of every kind, while the teenaged boy discovers he has the makings of a tzaddik -- is a tad more predictable but still enjoyable.

Jewish as it all is, the novel's conclusion left me thinking of Greene's The Power and The Glory and its trio of miracles proving the sainthood of the whiskey priest. Stern's final pages, even with one more bit of Rothian outlandish outrageousness at the very end, likewise beautifully conjure miracles and sanctity.

Ben Lerner, _Leaving the Atocha Station_

A BRILLIANT SHORT novel, perhaps of autobiographical inspiration, since Lerner himself grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and did a Fulbright year in Spain, and the novel's narrator, Adam Gordon, grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and has a grant to live in Spain for a year and write a long poem about the Spanish Civil War... except that Adam, a good Ashberyean, does not believe poems are "about" anything, so the idea that the book is "about" Lerner himself may be a red herring.

The novel could hardly be more convincing, though. It feels as knobbily real as anyone could wish, Ashbery notwithstanding. Lerner makes little to no effort to make Adam Gordon likeable, even in a roguish bad-boy way. He's a bit self-absorbed, not always honest, and given to pretending he understands more of what his Spanish interlocutors are saying than he really does. (Hilariously, Lerner often gives several versions of what a Spanish character just said.)

Adam's warts-and-all self-presentation does tend to win the reader over as the book proceeds, though, mainly because his engagement in the place and the people deepen. At first, he devotes almost all of his time either to writing poems by substituting words and rearranging lines in English translations of Garcia Lorca poems or to getting stoned. His first acquaintances occur in a fog of guesswork translation. Luckily, though, he gets the benefit of a doubt from some young Spanish artists and writers, who befriend him in, set up readings for him, and let him into their world. If these bright, energetic people like Adam, I found myself thinking, he must be OK.

Tension between the real and the represented heaves into view again at the end of Part 2, when Adam has an instant-messaging chat with a stateside friend who has actually witnessed a stranger's death, and then History raises the stakes in the question when Adam is in Madrid at the time of the Al-Quaeda bombing and the election that ousts Spain's pro-Bush government. Suddenly, in his po-mo, multiply-mediated way, he's in the tradition of Auden, Orwell, and the other writers who came to Spain during the crisis of the civil war. By the end of the novel, he's planning to stay in Spain. One suspects he won't...but his wanting to suggests to me that his heart has found its over-medicated, wandering way to the right place.

Timothy Donnelly, _The Cloud Corporation_

A LONGISH WAIT -- seven years -- who does he think he is, Elizabeth Bishop? -- but worth it. Donnelly still has the capacity, demonstrated repeatedly in Twenty-Seven Props..., to keep you teetering off-balance while moving recklessly forward, ultimately landing you in some spot you never saw coming until you were already there.

I keep thinking I detect some of the same species of way-too-late-Romanticism that Harold Bloom detected in middle-period Ashbery. "In His Tree" seems a contemporary busted-quest poem, along the lines of Shelley's Alastor, Browning's Pauline, Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre or Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower."

I set out to find that thing, drawn down by an under-

water instinct true to the warp and weft of a small

false deafness, locked deep in the blue-green private

compartment broken up into shifts and strung

in accordance to the wiles of arachnid light, a light too

truant from its source to reflect a compact back

with fidelity: the sun its half-remembered lozenge

trapped among the birch.

I plucked this virtually at random, but it's a good sample of the pleasures of the volume: the whiplash-inducing enjambment of "a small / false deafness," the twisty syntax (does "strung in accordance" modify "compartment" or "deafness"?), the baffled engagement with the natural world... which baffled engagement makes one think of the Romantics again, as does Donnelly's juggling with religious feelings he's not sure what to do with:

a lifelong feeling that I feel now, remembering

down the highway half-hypnotized in the

backseat feeling what I feel now, and moderate

happiness has nothing to do with it: I want to press

my face against the cold black window until

there is a deity whose only purpose is to stop this.

("The New Hymns")

There are hi-jinks as well, such as a hilariously terrifying blending of phrases from Springsteen's "Born to Run" with phrases from the Patriot Act ("The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports"). "Dream of a Poetry of Defense" works almost as well -- it blends Shelley's Defense of Poetry and the 9/11 Commission Report -- but the one blending the Beverly Hillbillies theme song with one of Osama bin Laden's addresses, ennh, I don't know. But the hits far outnumber the odd misses in The Cloud Corporation.

Jonathan Safran Foer, _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_

TO BE HONEST, I did not care for Everything Is Illuminated and had no plans to read Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, but then it ended up being one of the monthly selections of the book club, so... oh, well.

I enjoyed it more than I did Everything Is Illuminated. It certainly has what we could call a family resemblance. Oskar Schell, our narrator, is as richly provided with quirks as was Alex Perchov. We again have personal traumas nested within historical ones, the Holocaust in Everything, 9/11 and the Dresden fire-bombing in Extremely. In both novels, New World descendants come to terms with what happened to Old World ancestors.

I cannot quell my suspicion that J. S. F. is drawn to historical trauma and Old World settings because they all by themselves (he might hope) lend a gravitas that his fictions otherwise would not quite attain. For my money, Joshua Cohen blows him out of the water.

But I was fond of the almost Dickensian A. R. Black, his index cards and exclamation points, and I loved that Oskar was cast as Yorick in his school's streamlined production of Hamlet. I may give Foer's third novel, when it comes, a shot. I won't be letting him tell me what to eat, however.