This Week's Reads

BRICK LANE
By Monica Ali (Simon and Schuster, $25)

The dealthe big dealwith Monica Ali is that not only was she selected as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, but she was bestowed with that decennial honor before she even published this debut novel. Ali had previously worked in advertising and only flirted with the idea of being a writer when, all of a sudden, she became a famous one. The pressure could cripple some novelistsand crush some novelsbut Ali and Brick Lane easily shoulder the weight.

Lane tells the story of Nazneen and her confused, muddled, and mostly unhappy memories of her upbringing in Bangladesh, along with her equally unhappy adult life. Early on, Nazneen is sent off to Thatcher's U.K. to marry a British Bangladeshi who has a "face like a frog" and too many annoying qualities to list here; but believe me, Nazneen goes off on the guy. Although both Nazneen's marriage and subsequent family life remain joyless, Ali's restrained, dry humor makes the situation quite often hilarious.

Even the most tragic details of Lane are limned with the thin black brush strokes of comedy. Throughout the book, Nazneen's disgraced sister, Hasina, writes her letters from back home in Bangladesh that are so weirdly cryptic, error-ridden, and naive that, even though she describes some horrible atrocities, they swell with a strange comedic sweetness. Both she and Nazneen are lonely and heartbroken in crumbling, contemporary worlds that are too close to their childhood for true comfort but too far from it, too.

Along with the two separated sisters, Lane offers a stew of pungent supporting characters, including the other Bangladeshi women in Nazneen's apartment building, Hasina's neighbors, and, mostly through memories, the sisters' family. Lane is incredibly rich with these faces, kind hearts, and cruel spirits. It's one of those rare books that do what books really are supposed to do: escort you to another land and show youwholly, completely, and honestlyaround. LAURA CASSIDY

Monica Ali will read at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Wed., Sept. 17.

Author-lawyer Haslett. photo: Brigitte Lacombe

A young Ivy League lawyer, but far from the Grisham mold, Adam Haslett should consider quitting his day jobliterature needs him. Usually you can toss out several titles in a debut collection of stories (Stranger is new in paper) but not so here. All wrestle with lost souls, stifled urges, melancholia, manic depression, and outright madness. The unifying effect is like leafing through the pages of a physician's handbook, linking case studies with medications.

In "Notes to My Biographer," there's a manic 73-year-old inventor fleeing his family and stealing Saabs; his motto is "Never finish anything that bores you." In "The Good Doctor," a meth-case teen chops off his mother's fingers. In "My Father's Business," a biblio-nut scholar goes off his meds, begins audiotaping interviews with his friends and family as therapy, then ends up in a Mobius loop of philosophical references and his own disordered thoughts: " . . . do you really spend the day in a ghastly neurasthenic haze, and just what are those things you've started to draw on the wall that look vaguely like the symbols of some primitive religion. . . . "

Occasionally there's a whiff of English stuffiness to the football pitches, sideboards, and china (Haslett is half Brit), but the author also has a keen sense of the quotidian and American. In the collection's longest and best story, "The Volunteer," an alienated teen who visits a mental-home patient "imagines he's the only kid at high school who gets his romantic advice from a schizophrenic." At the same time, we learn how enterprising lads turn a kitchen sink and cut-off milk jug into an improvised bong. Ah, youth.

A protege of Jonathan Franzen, Haslett has been knocked for a certain patness to his stories (particularly their endings). Unlike so much deeply felt, unstructured junk clogging present-day lit mags, his traditionalism hews to the formula that so endeared his mentor (initially) to Oprah: sophisticated thoughts and powerful feelings free of fussy formalism. Literature ought to be accessible to Oprah watchers. So, yes, Haslett is trad, but he's not O. Henry trad. I'd love to read his briefs. BRIAN MILLER

Adam Haslett will read at University Book Store (4326 University Way N.E., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 18.

Lethem: straight outta Brooklyn. photo: Sylvia Plachy

This new novel about a mother-deprived Brooklyn boy arrives with a bigger critics' hallelujah chorus than the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn. It isn't as good as The Corrections, but Jonathan Lethem is Jonathan Franzen's literary successor as the New Big Noise, vindicating his early promise with this heart-stopping doorstop of a book. Like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, it's about two comic-book-crazed kids with an urge to right society's wrongs, only it's not nearly so focused on the funnies. Mostly, it's concerned with racial tension and family woeshow the latter propel kids into the ambiguous clan of street culture, despite the fractiousness of the former.