Grade:

B- "Making Scenes" (Alt-X Press) Adrienne Eisen

There's something about novels written by women, about women: Readers usually assume the author is writing about herself. It doesn't seem to happen as much to male authors; no one ever asks Stephen King if he's that guy who had some psycho break his legs.

But authors often do write about themselves, because people tend to write about what they know best. "Making Scenes," by Adrienne Eisen, and "Number 6 Fumbles," by Rachel Solar-Tuttle, are the authors' first novels, and they sure seem like they struck close to home.

In "Number 6 Fumbles," the reader meets Beck, a University of Pennsylvania sophomore who does well in school (though she procrastinates), has lots of friends and attends lots of parties - but doesn't have a boyfriend. She coasts through the school year until she sees Number 6 fumble the ball at an important football game against Cornell. The crowd curses and boos at the player, and Beck suddenly realizes the precariousness of her life.

Disillusioned by her realization, she hops from bar to bar to anonymous beds looking for new meaning to her life while wondering who would be there for her if she fumbled.

Solar-Tuttle, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, gives the main character limited depth. Beck's self-analysis is crucial to the book, otherwise "Number 6 Fumbles" is little more than a description of college clichˇs: drinking, slacking and anonymous hook-ups. The author presents college as a discovery of self-identity but ends the novel without really giving Beck much of an identity at all.

"Making Scenes" provides a good counter to "Number 6 Fumbles." Eisen's female protagonist has just finished college. Her life (the novel is in first person and doesn't reveal the speaker's name) makes post-collegiate life seem much harder than life as a student. The protagonist bounces from one dead-end job to another and from one man to another.

Eisen creates a much more complicated, and thus more interesting, character. Also, unlike the fairly dry sexual encounters of "Number 6 Fumbles," "Making Scenes" makes a scene. In fact, the reader can best approach the novel as a piece of hip erotica. Even through her questionable behavior (she shoplifts to make rent money, poses for Penthouse, has an affair with a married man and is bulimic), she's ultimately likable. Her numerous sexual encounters and job failures are numbing, but her vulnerability and intelligence shine through. Little details, like when she's dancing in front of her mirror to Sonic Youth, or reading "Ethan Frome" on her coffee break, make this book more satisfying and more real than "Number 6 Fumbles."

If anything of the authors' real lives shine through their characters in "Making Scenes" and "Number 6 Fumbles," it's the sense that their best work is yet to come. These novels show that Eisen and Solar-Tuttle have the basic tools for creating complex young women. It'll be up to their next novels to prove that they can find purposes for them.