There are a couple of things that I always do before reading a book.  Before buying it, actually.  First, I check out the Acknowledgments.  I’m always curious who writers thank.  And particularly who their agents are and if recognition was in order.  Next I’ll usually flip to the last page.  My wife is convinced that I read the ending, but really I just want to know how long a book is before I commit to it.  OK, I admit that I also read the book jacket blurb, and am capable of being fooled by breathless copy just as I am by a perfectly cut movie trailer.  Finally, I look at the author bio.  That’s usually where I slip into a reverie about condensing my own life story into the same space.  This is most likely to happen when I find the following phrase: “This is so-and-so’s first novel.”

I’m happy for the first-time author.  I really am.  I’d like to be so-and-so myself someday.  Of course, I’m also a tad jealous of the accomplishment.  And therefore more than a little bit picky when it comes to reading debuts.  I’ve read many that fell flat, but here are three worth considering.  One is relatively recent and two are must-reads if you missed them when they first came out.

I just finished Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances.  It took me a while to get into it (which is not a great thing when the book is only 240 pages long), but it did draw me in.  The writing is what I might call MFA-tainted, which in my mind is the general sense that graduate fiction programs reward complexity over clarity in sentence structure.  You could credit the style to the jumbled and over-intellectualized mind of the first-person narrator instead, but whatever the reason, there is a bit of a slog to get into the story.  This is the tale of a psychiatrist who believes that the woman who came home one night is not his wife, despite the fact that she looks and sounds exactly like her.  Similar to Carolyn Parkhurst’s The Dogs of Babel (which is another pretty good debut novel), Atmospheric Disturbances ultimately hinges on the reader’s impression of the narrator’s sanity and not the high-concept premise.  For me, the book turned out exactly how I expected it to, which is usually a bad thing, though in this case I admit it was a moving and satisfying ending.  As an aside, this was also case where reading the author’s bio affected my reading of the book.  Galchen is an M.D., and that definitely made me suspect that the narrator’s surreal thoughts would in the end have a real-world explanation.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is not technically a debut, since the author had published childrens’ books already — but it was his first novel for adults.   This also is somewhat of a mystery told from the first-person perspective of a unreliable narrator, in this case a boy with Asperger’s disease.  What makes this novel a necessary read is the absolute perfection that Haddon captures in the boy’s voice.  The reader is placed squarely inside this child’s head, which is not always a comfortable place to be.  While the mystery and quest are completely fabricated by the boy, the experience is so immersive that it is hard to not believe in it.  At the same time, there is a dread, a constant threat of disaster, hanging over the story, that carries through right to the end.  In Galchen’s book, I was able to distance myself from the narrator; in Haddon’s novel, I was not, and that is what makes it great.  For the record, I think that this may have also been the reason I enjoyed Haddon’s second book, A Spot of Bother, less than his first.  The second book had a large cast of colorful characters, some of them doing equally irrational things, but Haddon never tethered me as closely to them, allowing me to wonder about and doubt the need for their actions.

I haven’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel for the simple reason that it is a 9/11 book and I’ve mainly avoided those, having been largely disappointed by the literary treatments of that event and aftermath that I’ve read so far (which is probably fodder for a different blog post).  But this is a post about debut novels so I guess that’s pretty irrelevant anyway.  I usually avoid Holocaust books as well, but in the case of Foer’s debut, Everything Is Illuminated, I’m glad I broke that rule.  (Again, for the record, I should mention that I was not totally aware that was where the book was headed when I started it.)  Foer’s book has a main character named Jonathan Safran Foer, which in my mind is a little too-cutesy of a literary device and would normally disqualify a book for me.  Let’s just say there were lots of reasons I shouldn’t have liked this book, but instead I found it to be one of my favorites.  And clearly a model for the auspicious literary debut.  The character Foer, who turns out to be the least interesting person in the book, takes a trip to the Ukraine in search of his family history.  But it is the exquisitely drawn secondary characters, mainly the grandson and grandfather who guide him, that make this novel work.  That, along with the author’s Foer’s unique ability to be both hysterically funny and unflinchingly devastating in his storytelling make Everything Is Illuminated a must-read.