NARCISSUS ASCENDING

McKinnon's debut offers a tightly focused group portrait of 20-something friends in Manhattan's East Village. Becky is an artist who turns photos of herself into collages; she's in love with Hugh, an accountant, and her best friend is Dahlia, a dancer. Erstwhile actor Max lurks around the edges of this makeshift family. Becky narrates, but it's Callie—beautiful, treacherous, inscrutable and absent—who is the novel's truest subject. The fast-paced story follows Dahlia's plan to finally break away from the femme fatale who has wounded them all, by inviting her to the opening of Becky's first show, where Callie will see them all happy and triumphant. Francine Prose gave McKinnon a New Voice Fiction Award for this work as a novel-in-progress, and the book's first half makes it easy to see why. The writing is exquisitely economical, each word a precise fit with the next: "His lips are slightly parted, the color of my chair. The pink velvet needs recovering. I like coffee and I'm careless." McKinnon also reproduces the overlapping rhythms of speech among old friends authentically, and Becky has a pleasingly dry sense of humor. But as the novel spirals into a revenge scenario, the story devolves into junior high histrionics, including an extravagant faked suicide attempt and elaborately unhealthy sex. By novel's end, the promise of its beginning—the precision, the wit, the emotional clarity—is overwhelmed by adolescent melodrama. Author tour. (June)

Forecast:It's unlikely this title will appeal to an audience other than urban women under 25, despite the formidable blurb roster, including Andrea Barrett and Claire Messud.