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...