A THING (OR TWO) ABOUT CURTIS (AND CAMILLA)

Fowler takes a gooey, insipid look at the roller-coaster ride of young love in this cloying debut novel, which focuses incessantly on the brief but epic infatuation of an aspiring 30-something rock star with a gorgeous, exotic PR rep. The "boy meets girl" section begins when aging, wannabe rocker Curtis Birnbaum falls for Camilla Fell while on an outing in NYC's SoHo. Based on a few hip conversations sprinkled with the appropriate literary and musical references, Birnbaum quickly decides that Camilla is his soul mate, and things move along swimmingly during the courtship scenes. The "boy loses girl" material commences with an ill-fated weekend in Europe, when the hapless Curtis loses the keys to their lodgings. While Curtis and Camilla manage to make the best of things, the fighting begins shortly after they get home. Camilla quickly dumps her whiny, neurotic boyfriend, and Curtis goes through a predictably negative period of self-examination as Fowler engineers a ludicrous series of scenes in which Curtis gets kicked out of his health club and ends up seeing a clueless, self-important naturopath to have his manhood assessed. Fowler's prose ranges from amusingly slick (Camilla's legs are "creamy, unscarred and tan, like the skin on a new jar of Jiffy") to downright purple ("Dawn was rinsing Time against her window"), and the tone wavers uncertainly between earnestness and arch appraisal of the characters' follies. Fowler, a former musician who has a bit part in The Sopranos, gets credit for keeping the narrative moving, but not much else works in this half-baked debut. (June 10)