Clark Blaise's first novel ["Lunar Attractions"] covers some familiar ground both for him and for us…. [The] growing-up of a precociously observant, highly imaginative narrator in the South (or anywhere else) is tried and true, as is the alienation felt by such a character. But the ploy is not worn out, and Mr. Blaise does some original things with it.

David Greenwood, son of a French Canadian traveling salesman and a German-educated Englishwoman, identifies with the aliens in the science fiction that floods the radio and television of the 1940's and 50's. He's a natural outsider, plump and unhealthy, asthmatic and intellectual, growing up pensive in swampy central Florida. Real life is sordid, but the life of the mind is rich and full—so full, indeed, of miscellaneous information that David is diagnosed an idiot-savant. He's not crazy, but he is given to strange fantasies. A mudfish he's killed becomes, in his mind, either a creature from space, or the spirit of the sister his mother miscarried, or possibly both—anyway, a reason for terror and guilt. And the discovery of his father's real name on a document sets off paranoid fits.

The scene then shifts to a Northern city with a museum and a baseball team to lure. David into darkest reality. There are school friends of similar intellect but bewildering sophistication; there are sexual observations and the irresistible comprehension, which has been dawning all the time, of his parents' humanity. But "Lunar Attractions" stops short of a traditional concluding image: the optimistic discovery of a sense of mission, perhaps. We leave David on the threshold of nothing specific—except a maturity capable of producing these remarkable backward glances.

Mr. Blaise's narrative rhythm is impeccable. He has the knack, the storyteller's instinct for keeping the ball rolling, for tossing in just enough background at just the right moment to keep us curious without giving the game away. His dank, rural Florida suffocates mind and lungs. The relationships he presents puzzle, elate, amuse, alarm. David's obsessions, if not always reasonable, are never dull. Mr. Blaise is a thoughtful and entertaining writer, a rediscoverer of childhood with a good memory for his reactions the first time he passed through. "If my first thirteen years have any meaning, it is this: two worlds exist. One we create; it is ours alone, private and untranslatable. The other is always there; we do not control it. It has never changed; we can only discover it. There are gates to it everywhere, and sometimes the two worlds slide together."

However self-centered, David does not really escape or even ignore the world—it has such people in it! The walk-ons in "Lunar Attractions" are among the book's principal delights. Swiftly sketched, they fill a few pages with their imposing, intriguing presence, then drop from sight abruptly—as a child might notice an awesome adult, filling the view and then, inexplicably, gone. Each one—teachers and salesmen, a conjuror and a stamp dealer, friends and policemen—has his aria, but it is always a single side of an implicit three dimensional image.

The figures up front get more detailed treatment. All the attention of an anxious child, eager for signals and confused by them, is lavished on the earthy father and the gray, reserved mother. Through eyes obsessive in childhood, then narrowed in adolescence from anatomy to character to psyche, two masterful portraits merge. But the child in this trinity is not of proportional stature. David is a curious lump, a bundle of perceptions and social miseries, only latently adventurous. He lacks the authority to carry a Bildungsroman on his shoulders. His experiences resemble...