Coney
By Amram Ducovny
The Overlook Press, 320 pages

Think Isaac Bashevis Singer with an intermittent but unflappable hard-on -- and there you have Amram Ducovny's "Coney," a strangely beguiling coming-of-age story studded with fantastical forays into sexual mayhem. Harry Catzker, the novel's protagonist, idles away his 15th year roaming the streets and alleyways of Coney Island circa 1939: He turns a budding naturalist's eye on a pack of feral dogs, tracking their comings and goings and their curious infighting; he barrels down the boardwalk on his bicycle, racing his imaginary nemesis, a German liner captain whose ship lurks on the horizon; he engages the family's boarder, a Polish émigré and Yiddish poet named Aba, in gloriously poetic conversations up in the backyard cherry tree; and he gets beneath-the-boardwalk blow jobs from Schnozz the old penny arcade owner.

Whoa there -- what? Precisely. This debut novel by Ducovny, the father of "The X-Files" star David Duchovny and the author of 10 previous nonfiction works, seesaws between sweet, sepia-toned interludes from Harry's adolescence -- with some old-timey gangster intrigue thrown in for momentum -- and jostling episodes of carnal pandemonium that include a circus-freak orgy, Harry's deflowering at the hands of Fifi the Fat Lady and a wheelchair-bound crime boss and his dwarf henchman having sex with both ends of a prostitute while playing an invented game of cards on her back. Like Jerzy Kosinksi before him, Ducovny uses a child's imagination as a device to explore the nether region between the probable and the improbable. The result is a saucy and affecting fable of Jewish life in America, an alluringly lurid novel bursting with a Gogolesque coupling of tragedy and comedy and twinkling with the decadence of Coney Island, that playground of yore of American desire.

--Jonathan Miles

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"