Fiction

Mug shots delivered to the court the following week reveal that the “Dana Halter” charged with the assorted crimes, including assault with a deadly weapon, is a man. Whoever he is, he’s stolen enough of Dana’s information to obtain a driver’s license with her name on it. Then the collection agency calls start coming; the thief has maxed out several credit accounts, also in Dana’s name. Various frustrating encounters with government agencies and law enforcement officials ensue, and Dana and Bridger find themselves at a crossroads. They can deal with this by the book — writing endless letters to credit agencies and filing endless forms — or they can track the guy down themselves.

Meanwhile, alternating chapters describe the luxe life of William “Peck” Wilson, known to everyone around him as Dr. Dana Halter. Peck, who’s really a small-time restaurateur turned ex-con from upstate New York, drives a BMW and enjoys the view from his Marin County, Calif., home with Natalia, a premium specimen of gold-digging, post-Soviet arm candy. He feels he’s finally gotten what he deserves after years of what he perceives as mistreatment at the hands of the world — everyone in general and his ex-wife in particular. He still has a hard time controlling his temper, but life is sweet.

The body of “Talk Talk” describes Dana’s pursuit of Peck, a quest that soon has both couples racing cross-country by car. Dana’s outrage is visceral, and who can blame her? Peck has stolen an identity that she’s fiercely wrested from an inhospitable world. Along the journey, she finds herself having to order meals from or explain herself to a series of hearing people who give her “the interplanetary stare” and make her feel “like some animal on a leash.” Even with Bridger, who signs clumsily, she tends to fall away from full communication. (Lip-reading, the novel points out, is not nearly as easy as it’s depicted in the movies.)

It’s Peck, however, who is the novel’s great achievement, a character both frightening and pathetic, funny and infuriating, a masterly depiction of the kind of man who does very bad things with an impervious, resentful righteousness. (At one point, he rages at a graffiti-covered train station, “where were the cops when you needed them? Why weren’t they nailing the little punks with their spray cans instead of busting his ass?”) As far as Peck is concerned, he’s finally corrected the terrible injustice of his former insignificance, and when Dana and Bridger come along to mess it up, he’s every bit as indignant as they are. And this is a guy who can’t countenance the slightest challenge: “Maybe other people — the losers of the world — could turn the other cheek, bow their heads, suck it up, but he couldn’t. He had too much pride for that. Too much — what would you call it? — self-respect, self-love. Or confidence, confidence was a better word.”

What also emerges as the two couples converge in a small town on the Hudson River, is that Dana’s pride doesn’t differ all that much from Peck’s. Like him, she’s fought to compel other people to see her as she wants to be seen, often at the cost of not seeing anything else very clearly. Like him, she’s prepped to interpret the tiniest gesture as an insult. Like him, she flies off the handle and behaves recklessly to her own disadvantage. The novel’s title, “Talk Talk,” refers to an expression the deaf have about what happens when they get together — a torrent of communication unleashed in people who usually find communication difficult and incomplete. When Dana and Peck finally and truly meet, they don’t “talk talk” — they can’t — but some profound communication happens anyway, and both are shaken by it.

“Talk Talk” is smart and suspenseful, so much so that many readers may not even notice how beautifully crafted it is. Boyle has a way with flashy but apt metaphors — a private detective whose hair is “gel-slicked and glistening like the nose of something emerging from the sea”; a Utah motel room “frigid and dark, as remote from the world as a space capsule silently drifting across the universe.” But even more pleasing is the way that Peck, a gourmet cook who clearly missed his calling when his restaurant went belly up, tends to think in terms of his erstwhile profession. Tension slides away from him “like a wet coat in the foyer of a very good restaurant”; sailboats on the Hudson remind him of “clean white napkins on a big blue tablecloth.” This is how great fiction writing works, not by calling too much attention to itself, but by marshaling every word to the cause of making the characters and their story real.

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.