HOT AIR, by Marcy Dermansky

Marcy Dermansky’s new novel, “Hot Air,” begins with a hot-air balloon falling out of the sky and into a suburban swimming pool. The tech billionaire piloting the balloon, Jonathan Foster, is dumped out of the basket head first, and a bystander — our unlucky protagonist, Joanie, who is in the middle of a first date — dives in to save him. The billionaire’s wife, Julia, alights to dry land safely, aided by Joanie’s date, Johnny.

To recap: The four main characters are named Joanie, Johnny, Jonathan and Julia, for reasons I could not discern. These names, and the novel’s pared-down, childlike prose, give the book, Dermansky’s sixth, the feel of a nursery rhyme, despite some of the adult subject matter (notably, swinging).

After Joanie determines that the tuxedoed billionaire does not need CPR, she realizes that she recognizes him: “from the news, yes, but also from sleep-away camp, a long time ago.” He was her first kiss, it turns out, and (unlike her first kiss with Johnny, which has been interrupted by the balloon’s arrival) “it had been a good kiss, even — Joanie had felt her skin tingle.” But afterward he’d cruelly ignored her for the rest of the summer, then disappeared from her life.

If the multiple coincidences of this opening set up expectations for an antic, high-energy comic novel, readers will be surprised to find that what follows is mostly interior and meandering. The inverted structure is thrilling in concept — the climactic crash comes first, and the rest of the story is aftermath — but it can feel slack in execution, reading at times like protracted denouement.