FIRST FICTION

INNOCENTS

By Cathy Coote

Grove Press: 248 pp., $13 paper

She’s 16; he’s her 34-year-old teacher. It’s like that old Police song, except that, unlike Sting, Cathy Coote, an Australian novelist who wrote this book when she was all of 19, manages to avoid any clunky allusions to Nabokov. And yet “Innocents” is really “Lolita” turned upside down, where the obsessive Humbert Humbert is a nameless schoolgirl who draws her own pornography, and whose fetish object is her floppy English prof. “The simple act of breathing,” she confesses, “became charged with an unbearable eroticism.”

Appropriately enough, the erotic air of “Innocents” threatens to become unbearable, as the forbidden couple’s sex games grow increasingly outre: Coote has nothing against cranking the titillation level up to high and leaving it there. In this way, she resembles her nymphomaniac narrator, who similarly never lets up piling on cliche after cliche and scenario after scenario to keep her lover’s attention: “I choreographed myself.... I mixed utterly contrived emotion in with the real ones.... It became my delicate business to seem modest, good and vulnerable, while doing my best to encourage your basest instincts.” With adolescent zeal, she micromanages their escapades, while he, helpless to resist, buys them a house in another town.

Is Coote suggesting, God forbid, that the grown-up is the innocent in this lopsided pas de deux? Perhaps. But with her youthful recklessness, Coote’s turbocharged nymphet is, disturbingly, quite innocent too. What’s fascinating here, though, is how well “Innocents,” written by a teenager, portrays adult, innocence-ending consequences.

*

WILDERNESS RUN

By Maria Hummel

St. Martin’s: 352 pp., $24.95

“So many bullets were hitting the stream, it sounded like it was boiling.” Maria Hummel has a way with the stuff of battle, turning the horrific sounds, sights and smells into evanescent moments of exquisite lyricism.

Set in the Civil War, “Wilderness Run” (the title refers, ironically, to an idyllic Vermont stream, not the 1864 battle) is a visceral re-creation of inept skirmishes, blood-soaked field hospitals and dysentery-ridden convalescence camps. But it’s also a fascinating evocation of the home front, where Bel Lindsey, an adolescent Vermont bluestocking amped up on abolitionist rhetoric, writes dutiful letters to her beloved soldier cousin, Lawrence. Hummel shows us how the war not only wreaks irrevocable changes upon the nation, but also upon these precocious, devoted cousins too.

Growing up on the shores of Lake Champlain, the conspiratorial duo harbored an escaped slave together before the war. Now, on the front lines, Lawrence struggles to maintain his zeal for abolition, Walt Whitman and the Union, while Bel, living amid painted sleighs and parlor dances, unearths a potentially incendiary family secret.

These jolting shifts, from the roar of battle to the quiet intrigues of home, are handled with remarkable ease. Writing of death and drawing rooms with equal aplomb, Hummel has created an utterly devourable historical novel.

*

Q ROAD

By Bonnie Jo Campbell

Scribner: 276 pp., $24

The Q Road of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s gently comic novel about life in rural Michigan is a country lane known by the self-deprecating locals as Queer Road. The personages who live along Q Road, and their doings, are indeed a bit odd. There’s a paranoid lady named Elaine who lives in a prefab house, reading the Weekly World News and gazing out with dread at her various neighbors. There’s teenage Rachel, part Indian, who likes to cuss and brandish a rifle nearly as much as she likes to grow squash. There’s Steve Hoekstra, a window salesman who views every woman as a potential conquest, and his wife, who fantasizes about putting a butcher’s knife into him.

And then there’s hard-working George Harland, who just might be the queerest of them all: He’s quixotically holding on to the sprawling family farm, despite the encroachments of nearby housing developments, his own middle age and a baffling May-December marriage to Rachel.

Campbell is also the author of a story collection called “Women and Other Animals,” which chronicled similar turf; as a first-time novelist, she retains a short-story artist’s sensibility, with mixed results. The broad tableau of aluminum siding versus pig manure is rendered here with delicate, exacting strokes. But despite the rich detail and flickering epiphanies, this book frequently detours into bite-size vignettes and dead-end tangents. Inexplicably averse to narrative momentum, “Q Road” becomes, alas, a scenic byway that never seems to lead anywhere.