THE ISLAND
by David Borofka
The Island ($19.50; Nov. 1; 218 pp.; 1-878448-78-1): An awkwardly constructed coming-of-age novel (by the author of the story collection Hints of His Mortality, 1996) contrasts the first-person narrative of adolescent Calvin ``Fish'' Becker, who's vacationing in Oregon with the family of his parents' best friends, with the story of the elders' (of both families) friendly and romantic interminglings. Borofka's plot, obviously modelled on The Tempest, introduces the imperfectly evolved Fish to such baffling subjects as sex and Theosophy, but the intricate past and present relations of his hosts and parents, which are related in fragments by a distractingly contrasting omniscient narrator, and which should be part and parcel of Fish's story, are never made to cohere convincingly with it.