by JULIET WATERS

There's an episode of South Park where the kids discover a man who's been preserved in ice since 1996. The town lines up at the South Park museum to observe him hanging out in a glass cage, dressed in his grunge plaid shirt with a Fargo poster in his mock room. The episode is still funny now, but you definitely lose something of its brilliance if you didn't see it when it originally aired in 1998. All to say that a lot can change in America in a pretty short time, a point Lisa Selin Davis deftly hammers in with her excellent debut novel, Belly.

William "Belly" O'Leary is a little like this iceman. At first glance he doesn't seem the kind of guy you'd want to look at in a museum. He's certainly not the kind of guy whose head you could imagine wanting to be stuck in for an entire novel. And yet it's nearly impossible to turn away from him.

It's August 2001 in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Belly is fresh out of prison, "returning two years early to his hometown, four instead of six, his sentence commuted for good behaviour - something he'd never been accused of in his life." In these four years, Saratoga Springs has seen a lot of growth. Seedy bars have become cafés, local stores have become a Wal-Mart. Even the famous racetrack now has a family section. Belly, in contrast, has stayed stubbornly the same. The closest he's come to rehabilitation is the free hip replacement surgery he got in prison.

His hometown is hardly a welcoming place anymore for an old, chronic womanizer and drunk. But he seems to have something going for him. Barely minutes off the bus, he picks up a thirtysomething waitress at the Springway Diner. Selin Davis allows her reader to be almost as impressed with Belly as he is with himself... for about two seconds. Then, "she sashayed back to work, and he watched her ass move in acid-wash jeans."

Belly, both the man and the novel, is a work of art - the man in the most sarcastic possible application of that term, and the novel in its most sincere. Selin Davis has a remarkable talent for crafting devastating ironic detail with a fearless tenderness for her subject. It's kind of like the literary equivalent of watching a master tattoo artist at work.

At the same time, it's a hard, hard novel to love, just as it must have been hard to write. Belly is such a relentless and recalcitrant asshole. Racist, abusive, exploitative, narrow- minded and mean, he's such a relic from another era that the two of his four daughters who are still talking to him can barely muster hatred for him anymore, let alone love. As for the other two daughters, one is a lesbian thriving in New York who was smart enough cut off all contact years ago , and one is, as they say, "gone."

The mystery surrounding his third daughter's death is certainly one of the tensions that keeps one reading Belly long past the point where one starts deeply hoping he'll get shot. What keeps the novel really focused, however, is Selin Davis's ability to again and again bring the reader right back into the black, painful core of Belly's soul, and somehow hit just the right note of pain and humour. There's something in Selin Davis's voice that inspires confidence that Belly's bottoming out is going to end in a moment of hope as perfectly rendered as every moment of hell she's rendered so exquisitely until then.

In the end, she doesn't disappoint. Belly's small moment of growth is so believable, so dead-on evocative of this time and place in America, that it's deeply tempting to reveal it. But I won't. Instead I'll just hope this small, wonderful first novel gets discovered and, somehow, against all odds, preserved.

Belly: A Novel by Lisa Selin Davis, Little, Brown, hc, 288pp, $32.95