Reviews of three new books.   Cut My Hair by Jamie S. Rich (Crazyfish, 236 pages, $14.95   Cut My Hair, Jamie Rich's first novel, is a lyrical elegy to lost youth, the death of modern rock, and the search for something authentic. Rich, a Portlander by choice who has worked for local papers and Dark Horse Comics, sets his coming-of-age tale throughout Southern California. The threads of plot revolve around a moony kid who reaches manhood in the early-'90s rock scene (imagine if High Fidelity had been about a Santa Monica teenager and read more like a sweet comic-book confessional than a Hornby novel). Rich's novel is full of excellent, spare writing that can lure any reader to its skeletal story. He lingers over beautifully rendered character descriptions, making even the most ancillary figures vital and relevant. He also offers provocative passages on music's ability to grip people's souls. With a simple sort of poetry, Rich keeps it honest--sometimes too honest. A few characters launch into monologues during which they spill every single one of their guts. The major symbol, a gun, recurs as chronically as crabs in a whorehouse to remind us that the book has Big Meaning. These sections need the work of a loving X-Acto blade, but they're forgivable in light of the entire work. Rich's biggest accomplishment is in capturing an era that ended so softly that many are still wondering how it faded away. From the characters' ennui to the accompanying illustrations (drawn by such comic book artists as Chynna Clugston-Major), Cut My Hair evokes the recession years more richly than any retro-modrock radio station could. To the Morrissey fans, the Spin readers and those who spent their youth searching for perfect truth instead of perfect prom dates: Here is your novel. Lisa Lambert       Living to Tell by Antonya Nelson (Scribner, 317 pages, $24)       So your brother is an ex-con, your sister's an ex-slut, your other sister sleeps with married men and you all still live at home with your parents. Big deal. Every family seems hopelessly screwed-up in some way--everyone else's family, that is. People can't see their own clan's foibles. No matter how dysfunctional your family is, you all find a way to deal. The challenge for a fiction writer is to convey that paradoxical cohesion to an outsider. Antonya Nelson, one of contemporary American fiction's most unheralded geniuses, kicks that challenge's ass with her juicy family saga, Living to Tell. The story begins when Winston Mabie returns home to Wichita, Kan., after serving a five-year prison sentence for driving drunk and killing his beloved grandmother. Winston's happy family includes his emotionally distant mother; his father, a former history professor who despises Winston for killing his mother; oldest sister Emily, a rigid single mother with a sordid past; and Mona, the youngest, who repeatedly becomes involved with unavailable men only to suffer unbearable heartbreak. They are all insomniacs. They are all hopelessly stuck, hiding in their sprawling house like it's a fortress. But life moves forward in spite of the Mabies' immobility. Nelson never fully explains how the members of this family developed their individual flaws, but she doesn't need to. She leisurely flits about through each character's point of view until she unravels the tightly knit tribe's stitches. She dives so deeply into these people's minds, by the end of the book, you feel as though they are your own family. Nelson writes engrossing, missed-your-bus-stop fiction. Read her now. Susan Wickstrom         The Portable Louisa May Alcott Edited by Elizabeth Lennox Keyser (Penguin, 612 pages, $16.95)         Until the mid-1990s, there was but one Louisa May Alcott in the public mind: the beloved author of such children's classics as Little Women and Jo's Boys. Thanks to the spadework of 20th-century feminist literary historians, we now know there was another Alcott who penned pulp fiction featuring racy heroines and serious adult novels with proto-feminist themes. In her introduction, editor Elizabeth Lennox Keyser attempts, somewhat unsatisfactorily, to trace this dichotomy in Alcott's fiction to her stifling, impoverished family life in Concord, Mass., where the Alcotts rubbed elbows with almost everybody who was anybody in mid-19th-century American literature: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, among others. In the process, Keyser barely mentions, and then almost completely ignores, the influence of perhaps the central event in Alcott's life: her brief service as a Civil War nurse for Union soldiers in Washington, D.C., in 1863. Not only did the experience expose Alcott to the horrors of war firsthand, but she also contracted typhoid pneumonia. The disease, and its treatment at the time, almost killed her. Yet it was in the five-year period between her Civil War service and the publication of Little Women in 1868 that Alcott wrote and/or published most of her sensation fiction. (Hospital Sketches, the book about her nursing experiences that put Alcott on the literary map, is not even excerpted here.) Keyser's choices include thrilling short stories, published anonymously or under pen names, and selections from Alcott's later adult novels, as well as her hilarious satire of life at a failed transcendentalist commune. If only she could have offered more insight into this complex, tortured literary figure. Matt Buckingham