I Am Hot

If the Iliad were brand-new — if it were one of this summer's beach-reading blockbusters — it wouldn't be a swashbuckling saga of siege, slave girls and slaughter. That stuff might be in there, sure, but only as adornments to the main bit, which would be Homer yakking about how it feels to be Ionian. And a poet. And blind. He would speculate about his dad. (Was he abusive? A prisoner of war?) He would mope about growing up in Chios and extol the silken tang of olive oil. He would skewer scholars who say he never existed. Homer would shriek I did! in italic, proffering some anecdote about puking or shoplifting to prove it. His book would be all about him.

Because that's how it is now. Books are less about what folks do than what folks are. Not who but what. Whether it's a meditation on autism by an autistic (Kamran Nazeer's Send in the Idiots); a history of untouchables by an untouchable (Narendra Jadhav's Untouchables); a memoir by a woman who spent 18 months pretending to be a man, not for kicks but to "infiltrate" (Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man); or a novel with a narrator who keeps reminding you I'm adoptedor I'm insane or I'm London's best Ugandan-Indian private eye or I'm white in Africa or I'm someone's pet tortoise (Dana Reinhardt's A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life,Clare Allan's Poppy Shakespeare,Patrick Neate's City of Tiny Lights, Tony D'Souza's Whiteman,Verlyn Klinkenborg's Timothy) — the gist is always "Look at me because ... I'm me."

Not that it can't be fun, but it says something about us that we'll look even if these authors and their characters fall overboard or never tunnel out of prison camps. When and why did the open-and-shut matter of identity unseat adventure? Are we that remote from one another these days, or that balkanized, paranoid or pathologically shy?

You could say we're just more curious. Or too overstimulated by real life for giant white whales. Yet under the slick, smooth-seeming passivity of today's look-at-me books lies a subtle aggression: The identities they ply prick the privileged and the plain-living. Thus, most readers emerge feeling guilt-racked or dull. Damn my lucky ancestors, millions seethe. I could've been an author!

But overlook the thumping, one-note, navel-gazing element in these books — accept it as an inescapable sign of the times the way medieval Europeans accepted leprosy — and, because you must be bashed over the head with identity, choose your bashers well.

City of Tiny Lights is hilarious. In a whirl of mixed metaphors meant to evoke a crowded, new England where castles are owned by "voracious Japanese," its narrator's ex-mujahideen status ("Nobody can be as invisible as a Paki") lets him get away with joshing about jihad and oozing casual, confident racism — noting of a pouty black hooker: "You could have thrown her at a window and that mouth would've stuck fast."

Transgressive observations — a floor-toilet has "logs of shit floating in it, the flies ... clinging to the shit like black men on lifeboats" — also spring from the lips of an American aid-worker whose African neighbors call him "whiteman" and accuse his kind of inventing AIDS in Peace Corps alum D'Souza's Whiteman, a self-conscious venture into a bloody heart-of-darkness civil war that makes its narrator feel "alive and important for the first time."

Reinhardt wields deft teenspeak in her assuredly funny debut about a high schooler whose adoptee status "is this one thing that defines me, but there isn't a club for it and I can't tattoo it on my shoulder blade or on my ankle or the small of my back." Allan, also a dazzling first-timer, similarly immerses herself in the alternate universe of her narrator: a mental hospital whose inmates ("dribblers") bear nicknames based on their symptoms — Manic Polyanna, Verna the Vomit, Sue the Slasher — evoked in you-are-there idiom.

And Klinkenborg writes in the tour-de-force voice of an 18th-century tortoise "stolen from myself," made a slave by men with walled gardens. One of this year's marvels, Timothy flings the notion of identity beyond the bounds of species, outside the human realm of "great soft tottering beasts. ... That mass of body and brainpan to heat and cool with their internal fires. No tegument, no pelt to help them. ... Uneconomic creatures."

Born with cerebral palsy, Ruben Gallego was abandoned to a Soviet orphanage by his high-ranking Spanish communist family. In institutions too poor for wheelchairs, Gallego grew up crawling down corridors, told he wasn't worth teaching. "I'm a retard," he declares in his searing memoir, White on Black, the story of a soul who wants so badly to be a boy who can stand rather than a boy who cannot stand. This longing "bubbles up spontaneously, from deep in my animal core." He urges: "Imagine a paralyzed little person."

If you're inclined to make an academic discipline out of "hello my name is," Jadhav packs facts and feelings into his history of India's lowest caste. Activists in a mid-20th-century untouchable-liberation movement, the author's parents became Buddhists to both flee and reject the Hindu religion that barred them not only from attaining education and prestige but also from entering the temples of their own gods. It's a long-overdue account, though Jadhav sometimes trips over his struggle to deliver it in three different voices.