by JULIET WATERS

After walking out of the sea, where he has lived all his life under the instruction of the Elders of Atlantis, Jack Fish arrives on the shores of New Jersey with a short to-do list: (1) Learn to breathe, (2) Find Victor Sargasso, (3) Kill him.

It’s a simple list, but deceptively complicated, as the best noir adventures always are. It’s the rare noir hero, however, who begins his journey gasping on a beach dressed in nothing but a mankini. The learning-to-breathe part turns out to be harder than expected, so even as he makes his way through the city, we continue to find Jack in uncomfortable and unusual situations.

“Jack let a little air slip in through his parched mouth, and the pain of it hitting his throat pitched him forward. His guttural cry and retch echoed in the bowl: and his nose dipped into the cool water below. Jack plunged his entire face into the toilet, dragging in relief and exhaling great bubbly wafts. Finally, he pulled himself upright, and sat back on his heels, dripping and sniffing and blinking his eyes.”

As if the challenge of life with a wet paper towel respirator weren’t enough, someone needs to teach the Elders a thing or two about how to navigate the treacherous terrain of NYC culture. Jeans and an “I heart NY” T-shirt are hardly the appropriate attire for some of the seedier places Jack will have to check out on his quest to spear Sargasso, a rogue agent now working as a Manhattan architect. Then again, it does fit his assumed identity, a pool salesman from Toronto. Trying to blend in with the clientele at a bar where he might find information on Sargasso, Jack is suspiciously un-amazed by a tall sex tale involving fur sheets... We of course know it’s because he’s aquatic. The barfly crowd seem content to accept that he’s simply Canadian. Debut novelist J Milligan equips Jack with an impenetrable innocence that is both a gift and a curse. Like Mark Haddon’s autistic 12-year-old in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jack’s limited point of view actually works like a blank page upon which the plain world seems hyper-problematic.

“The neighborhood was like a reef, with apartment buildings serving as the crusty infrastructure and creatures exploiting every available niche, people everywhere filling it with life, making it live. Jack understood it. He could see how interconnected it was, how there was a delicate balance that made it work. If the temperature went up just one degree there would be chaos and widespread death. Jack moved through the teeming streets, touching nothing.”

Or hyper funny:

“These were the new workers of Brooklyn. The work they did was casual, freelance, consulting or ‘independent contracting.’ They made things like PowerPoint presentations and intranets and ‘solutions’ to non-existent problems, things that required frustrating computers running shoddy software to make things that nobody really wanted and that had no permanence or truth... Their eyes were glazed over with boredom, from CRT burnout, from fluorescent lighting, from reading the subtitles on foreign films, from reading poetry on the subway, from squinting in disgust at people who fit in established social groups and had money and comfort and didn’t conceive of a status quo as something to struggle against. And they were ready to party in their own disaffected weird way.”

Like a hipper, raunchier, more imaginative version of the movie Elf, Jack’s innocence works as a foil to the cynical pretensions of both the genre and the city it parodies. The downside of Jack’s emotional simplicity is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of character or story development. Laugh-out-loud funny, even brilliant sometimes, Jack Fish hooks you, then leaves you hanging for a little too long. Still, there’s enough raw talent in this debut novel to convince anyone that Milligan’s likely to return as a much bigger fish in the literary pond.

Jack Fish by J Milligan, Soho Press, pb, 219pp, $12.99