Penny Tangey and Sue Saliba have chosen to tap into this enduring fascination in their new books, Clara in Washington and Alaska, respectively,placing their Australian protagonists in iconic North American locations to explore notions of place, identity, and home. In doing so they raise prescient political questions. This re-mythologising of such storied places obviously remains one-way traffic. It is difficult to imagine US authors with similar tales to tell calling their books Tasmania or Clara in Canberra.

Mia, skipping her last year of school, has travelled to Alaska to visit her beloved older sister Em. The trip also offers Mia a chance to escape her alcoholic mother, who is currently undergoing another stint of rehabilitation, and to meet her new nephew, Christian. But Em’s allegiances seem to have shifted and the sisterly relationship does not work as it has done before. A chance meeting with an African refugee named Ethan turns Mia’s holiday on its head. Her infatuation with Alaska’s wilds leads to a highly physical connection with this man whom she hardly knows.

Saliba’s book has been called lyrical, even a verse novel, but these descriptions do not convey her genuinely unusual style. All capitalisation is eschewed, the narrative consisting of a series of image-scenes strung together almost randomly, while Saliba’s idiosyncratic paragraphing mimics her protagonist’s flighty and impressionistic thought patterns. Mia is a dreamer whose favourite book is Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and who feels an affinity with the animals that populate the wilderness around her: ‘this was mia’s downfall and her joy, that she could imagine anything into existence: fairies, deities, the imminent return of her father who had left when mia was eight and never re-appeared.’ Gail Jones may be an influence here, especially in Saliba’s desire to explore philosophy through poetic fiction.

What compels the narrative forward is a vague sense of foreboding. Em disapproves of Mia’s burgeoning romance with Ethan, although it is unclear why. Mia begins to fear Em’s husband, Terrence, for no other reason than that he killed a deer while hunting. Then Mia becomes involved in a local environmental protest against plans to run an oil pipeline through the forest, which is again imbued with an odd sense of presentiment. Somehow we are meant to feel as though everything is not as it seems, without really knowing how it should seem in the first place.

While Saliba deserves credit for exploring new ways of telling her story, Alaska ultimately feels laborious, weighed down by its own portentousness. For a book so much about interiors and interiority, the writing is all surfaces. Every line strains to be profound. As with vapours, if you push there is little there. At a protest meeting, Mia reads a message a young girl writes, ‘if we behaved as though the god in all life mattered’, and is ‘suddenly transported. what an enchanted world it would be’. Saliba wants us to be transported, too. I could never quite go with her.

There is also an odd repetitiousness in both tone and dramatic action. Characters are always being startled by others during moments of reverie, rhetorical questions are asked and then immediately answered, while Mia oscillates between feeling a heightened sense of unity with the world and being enveloped by gloom or panic, all for no particular reason. Saliba has chosen to set a mood rather than tell much of a story. But a mood that reveals no greater thought or revelation (despite the author’s best attempts) tends to be dismissed as the brain’s chemicals playing tricks.

Clara in Washington is a much more straightforwardly told coming-of-age story. Clara joins her career-minded mother on her trip to Washington for a stint with the World Bank. For Clara, the trip presents the opportunity to take her mind off her pending Year Twelve results and to abandon her comfort zone. At first, Clara is too afraid of being mugged or caught in a terrorist attack to do much exploring, but at her mother’s urging she begins sightseeing and then volunteers for local NGOs, if only to have something interesting and altruistic to note on Facebook. At Reading Beyond Bars, Clara meets and falls for Campbell, who, along with his fellow anarchist friends, introduces her to the finer points of squatting and the protest movement. At a local women’s shelter, Clara is exposed to the softer-left politics of Brad and Emily, a middle-class couple excited about Obama’s impending inauguration and the change it presages.

For a book such as Tangey’s to work, Clara’s wry voice must be pitch-perfect – too clever and knowing and readers will not warm to her; too awkward and self-deprecating and we will not trust her observations. Laura Buzo got such a voice right in her brilliant The Good Oil (2010), and Tangey does the same here. Much of the humour is generated through insightful observations of people and their pretensions. At her first anarchist collective meeting, Clara remarks: ‘A girl standing next to me is wearing a tea-cosy on her head. Not a beanie that looks like a tea-cosy, an actual tea-cosy. I can see the holes for the spout and handle. I’m intimidated by her. I’m sure she thinks I’m incredibly boring.’

However, Tangey wisely takes Campbell’s anarchism seriously, giving him and his cohort space to quote Proudhon and explain why ‘Obama isn’t the answer because the system is the problem.’ But she also conveys the way in which idealism can sometimes cause people to care little for the feelings of others. And she really nails the shame we have all felt (admit it) on finding ourselves by far the most conservative person in the room.

While on the surface both books centre on first love and love lost, at heart these authors want to connect their readers with ideas. Saliba’s fairy tale as eco-criticism asks us to consider why it is worth protecting the world’s last wilderness areas from being plundered. Tangey uses Clara’s experiences of altruism and radical politics to champion the benefits of becoming politically engaged. It is worth noting that from a feminist perspective, both novels feel somewhat regressive (Clara and Em both impugn their mothers, for example, for their failure as housewives). Still, at a time when political activism among Generation Y is said to be perilously low, such interventions in fiction seem timely.