Books: Independent choice American comic fiction

Saul "Doc" Karoo is a fixer of bad movies whose life is out of control. The anti-hero of Steve Tesich's Karoo (Chatto & Windus, pounds 9.99), he has severe problems showing intimacy; he's all but estranged from his adopted son, Billy, and his marriage is failing. He smokes and drinks like a vintage engine on the brink of collapse, but is only ever intoxicated by fictions. So he lies pathologically. When he discovers Billy's birth- mother, Leila, acting in the most recent film sent for him to scalpel Saul recognises a way to redeem his own shallow life by bringing Billy and Leila together in one glutinous Hollywood ending. Hacking apart the magnificent reels, Saul compromises his last vestige of integrity (but improves his sex life) by turning Leila's walk-on sassy waitress into the banal starring role.

Karoo's delightful dinners with his wife (where publicly discussing their impending divorce makes them feel married) and the tension that escalates towards the film's anguished premiere are the high points in a fast-paced but unrefined narrative. Editing Karoo may have been difficult, since the author died in 1996, but clunky slabs of detail are made more obvious by the lack of grounding for Karoo's whopping fibs. Saul winds up failed, ill, bleeding in a Burbank toilet, fantasising a script of a futuristic Ulysses.

If your taste is for toilet-surrealism, Mark Maxwell's fiction about Richard Nixon and his neighbour Raymond Carver, That Other Lifetime (Sceptre, pounds 10), has a joyful sprinkling of weirdness and scatology. Nixon hurls some great insults, but arse is his expletive du jour: lily arse, lazy arse, pansy arse pudwackers. Even writing a letter of condolence to Carver's wife Beth: "Your husband was an arsehole." Watergate? "Lot of constipation."

The novel places side by side the possible lives of the disgraced ex- president and the canonised writer. Maxwell tags along with the pair during fishing trips and baseball games, recording the anecdotes cracked in their unlikely friendship. Ray's quiet humour complements Tricky Dickie's self- promotion and soon their differences (a former US president and a poet- cum-morgue janitor) appear smaller than their common experiences of poor upbringings, serious illness and failed loves. The night Nixon resigned, Maxwell lay in bed "wondering" about him as he used to wonder about Santa Claus. His affectionate, playful myth-making makes a refreshing escape from the precision of history.

Brooklyn drummer Rafi Zabor also peoples his first novel, The Bear Comes Home (Cape, pounds 10), with the real - Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden and other friends from the jazz world. But his hero is a saxophone-playing bear: literate, talkative, shy, emotional. Arrested for gigging in New York, the Bear is sprung from stir by a comical pastiche posse of jazzmen. In shock, the Bear cuts an album and heads off on a Midwestern tour, returning to form only when he comes back to Manhattan to rebuild the relationship with his girlfriend, Iris.

This does scant justice to an intense odyssey that rarely hits the doldrums. Zabor writes in a purely jazz style, often taking a basic image and elaborating it free-form, echoing and bouncing motifs around the text. The subversive history of jazz and the threat of creative power are compressed into a metaphor of ursinity unleashed.