The graduating class The best and the brightest of summertime reads BY RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO

June is the month for lilac-scented weddings, bon voyage parties, and, of course, graduation ceremonies. In the literary world, the relay of the spring-to-summer baton means decidedly lighter fare: beach reads, wine and dog books, the latest over-hyped New York Times bestseller. But with the onslaught of titles published every summer, the brightest, most sparkling gems often get buried in the sand. Here we hail a few magna and summa cum laudes among the literary pack.

THE HEAD OF THE CLASS: NADEEM ASLAM

A friend’s mother once told her wisely that the reason the French did not get fat — or waste time obsessing over Atkins or South Beach or the latest calorie-ridding diet craze — was because they savored their food as if each bite were an expensive four-course meal. The French could sup on calorie-rich Brie with a fine meaty Bordeaux because they ate it without rushing, relishing every drop, every slice, every trace of flavor on their tongues and lips. Good writing does the same, allowing a reader to delight in sumptuous storytelling, to embody Milan Kundera’s idea of "slowness," to make close reading a quality to admire. Such intricate, somewhat Victorian pacing characterizes Nadeem Aslam’s acclaimed second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (Knopf), a captivating diorama of a close-knit Pakistani family surviving in a difficult English town.

"Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself." Here, in the book’s first few lines, Aslam seems to tell his readers: relax, put down your coat, this is the kind of Pointillist story I’ll be telling; this world that I’m going to reveal to you will unfold as deliberately as these snowflakes being pulled to the earth. And so it does.

THE SOFT-SPOKEN POET: SUSAN WHEELER

Wheeler, an award-winning poet, proves her prose-writing mettle in Record Palace (Graywolf). In contrast to Aslam’s quiet tale of a Pakistani family and its rigid community, Wheeler’s story centers on a single white woman making her way alone in a less-restrained African-American neighborhood. This is the rough-and-tumble South Side of Chicago in the late ’70s, a down-trodden place where "downtown buildings thinned and the streets darkened, each boarded brownstone abutting another in rubble." Enter Cindy, a white girl fleeing the staid, suburban life of her California childhood, seeking jazz albums, friendship, and the elusive meaning of life.

In all her writing, Wheeler’s lyrical voice remains inescapable. We’re treated to an intriguing, jagged syntax that reads like a manual transmission sliding into gear: "Soon after I found Acie’s, stopping by on a Friday for a paycheck." Like a well-crafted poem, Wheeler’s prose gradually draws the reader into its rhythms. This is a solid novel about a graduate student studying art yet unable to escape her passion for music, and the oddly engaging syntax mirrors this tension: "The beat threw me, but not the sound: the brain, jumping. The interplay turned on a dime." Ultimately, Record Palace is a prose ballad of longing and love.

THE TORTURED BUT POPULAR RICH KID: SEAN WILSEY

When you’re a voracious reader who constantly picks up books, browses one or two pages, puts the same book down, and picks up another before putting it down and trying to remember which of the books on your coffee table or the bookstore’s table or your rumbling white washing machine you happened to be reading last — then, the fact that a randomly picked-up book entices you to keep reading is often the only true mark of something good. Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All (Penguin Press) is, despite all its publishing-world hype, that kind of book. I’m serious: the book is that good.

Wilsey’s sprawling memoir is a whopping 482 pages, one of those door-stoppers of a life story, and it comes at you like an avalanche of memories and wonderment. It has Nobel Prize winners discussing the Holocaust over lunch; Wilsey’s effervescent father delivering the author to a video arcade via his private helicopter; and later, Augusten Burroughs–like tales of therapy and a life out of control. The paragraphs are often clipped and feel breathless, as if the author wants to tell you everything about his life before he runs out of time. I haven’t read anything quite as attention-grabbing or bursting with life since Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And as in Eggers’s work, this book’s capacity for joy is no small feat.

THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER: AMY HEMPEL

Often (deservedly) called a "writer’s writer," Amy Hempel offers her fourth collection of witty, insanely great stories to devoted readers and converts alike. The Dog of the Marriage (Scribner) is by turns hilarious and wry. But instead of providing an outright laugh track, Hempel brings out the absurdist, Beckett-style moments in life. You can’t help but smile to yourself when you imagine a character procrastinating from her travels on the road by asking a naive realtor to show her available real estate.

The title story gives us a quirky dog trainer whose marriage is falling apart. Early on, she tells her departing husband about the way her dogs are patient, obedient, and — in contrast to their human counterparts — infinitely kind: "I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way people flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn’t a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction — dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there’s not an end to it." In her spot-on observations of contemporary life, Hempel captures the nuances of heartbreak and love with a master’s eye.

THE SMART GUY DRESSED IN BLACK IN THE BACK ROW: DON NACE

Desperadoes, lovers, scintillating images of frazzled New Yorkers beside masked Mexican wrestlers frozen in flight: what could be a disastrous assortment of notebook scribbles (seemingly thousands of them) is crafted into Don Nace’s handsome graphic novel Drawn Out (Soft Skull Press). As the blurb rightly states, this 224-page behemoth is "a masterwork 30 years in the making."

Nace’s writings run like captions along the bottom of each drawing. "My first grade teacher told us to draw a story on a piece of paper" is scrawled beneath a stick figure of a skier falling down a slope; "I escaped to New York City, the jugular vein of the world" accompanies a terrifying amalgam of familiar skyscrapers and monuments, taxis and foot traffic; "Drunk and entombed in the crusty layers of my apartment" is Nace’s description of a difficult period in his 20s spent dealing with booze, women, and rejection by the art-world establishment. But more than his words on the page, it is Nace’s drawings that provide the visual equivalent of an intricate Updike scene. In a lesser artist’s hands, these sketches would be just that: mere sketches of a life. But like the obsessive, internal worlds of Henry Darger or Adrian Tomine’s ennui-ridden San Franciscans, Nace’s trademark needle-scratch drawings are complete short stories in themselves.

THE ART-SCHOOL PROTÉGÉE: JULIA SLAVIN

Surrealism, prescription drugs, an ear for rhythm, and an eye (and nose, tongue, and skin) for detail: novelist Julia Slavin weaves all these elements into her fabulist novel, Carnivore Diet (W.W. Norton), a follow-up to her wildly accomplished story collection, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club. Wendy Dunleavy and her son Dylan — dual narrators of this, Slavin’s first novel —must stave off a drooling mythical beast named the Chagwa (whose sexual organ both horrifies and titillates the socialites in the book). Slavin’s comic, highly absurd style is evident in a scene between Wendy and her "prescription-friendly gynecologist": "Dave took a gentle pap smear and asked if I’d be willing to take some literature about slavery among women in Afghanistan. I said certainly, and by the way, while I’m here, could I get a prescription of Dozanine?"

This absurdity even trickles down to Dylan’s narration, as he is forced to slaughter farm animals to feed the hungry Chagwa: "We should have been doing cannonballs at the pool, popping wheelies and other things happy kids did in the summer, not on our way to kill a pony. Nothing ever worked out the way I expected."

At times Slavin restrains her Dali-like tendencies in favor of simply soaking in her characters’ musings: "It was one of those warm late afternoons when the air gets in your clothes and fools with you and the light makes everybody look good." These are the moments when her writing soars, when the wild somersaults and carnival tricks take a back seat to the characters’ vulnerabilities. Near the end of the novel, for example, a recently reunited mother and son to reflect on something that catches their eye near the marble wall of the Vietnam Veterans’ War Memorial:

"Look, Dylan," my mother pointed to a name on the Wall. "A boy named Mister Mister. Can you imagine naming a baby Mister?"

You get used to missing someone to the point where the missing replaces her. And then the missing has nothing to do with her. There was no room for her with all the space the missing took.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco can be reached at mail@riccosiasoco.com