Short Takes

Confessions of a Memory Eater
By Pagan Kennedy
Leapfrog, 248 pp., $14.95

For a writer who arrives preceded by a super-cool underground reputation (one reviewer hailed her as ``Queen of the 'Zines"), Pagan Kennedy has produced a strangely subdued, even (gasp!) conventional novel in ``Confessions of a Memory Eater."

The narrator, the ironically named Win Duncan, is a man on a losing streak. Uninspired by the third-rate college where he teaches, eclipsed by his ambitious wife, he has been unable to crank out the obligatory monograph on his specialty, the eccentric English writer Thomas de Quincey (an interest telegraphed by the title of the novel). Depressed and directionless, Win falls into the orbit of a charismatic entrepreneur who has developed a drug that enables the user to retreat into vividly remembered moments from the past, a prospect that Win frankly finds more appealing than his disappointing present.

In Win, Kennedy creates a persuasive, which is not to say sympathetic, modern male protagonist in the throes of a midlife crisis. Despite the drug motif (a topic whose scandal value is well beyond its sell-by date) and the nod to science fiction, you can't get much more mainstream than that.

End of I.
By Stephen Dixon
McSweeney's, 200 pp., $22

Reading a passage of Stephen Dixon's uncanny fiction is like pressing up to a representational painting and finding it composed of jots and blotches. Step back to the prescribed distance, and the illusion of hyper-reality is once again complete.

Consider the stutter-steps that begin one episode (``When-- Among-- Some twenty years after-- His mother-- He was at his mother's apartment. ") in which the narrator tries to find a way to begin explaining what his brother came across while cleaning out their mother's apartment shortly after her death. Consider the allusive stage props (the matter-of-factly mentioned wheelchair) and the stage business of tending and worrying that tells us everything and yet next to nothing about the narrator's invalid wife (neither she nor her illness is ever named) and his relationship with her.

``End of I.," a sequel of sorts to Dixon's ``I." (the only name he gives his alter ego protagonist), is bracketed by mortality -- the death of a childhood friend recalled as the novel begins, the loss of another friend registered as it ends -- and steeped in loss, guilt, melancholy throughout. That it doesn't make us want to slit our wrists is a tribute to the abstract artistry of Dixon's prose.

Nancy Culpepper
By Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House, 240 pp., $22.95

``This is all there is in the world," thinks Spence Culpepper standing on a rise, looking out across his Kentucky farm, ``yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different." Spence, of course, isn't really thinking about ``people everywhere" but about his three grown children, and in particular his daughter Nancy, the family ``adventurer," drawn home now, while her mother, Lila, is in the hospital, away from her life up north, her scholarly work, her artist husband, a thousand light-years distant from her Southern country beginnings.

The interrelated stories that make up this book shift decade, locale, point of view to examine from myriad perches Nancy's conflicted relationships with the people she loves, most particularly the salt-of-the earth parents whose simplicity is for her a source of pride and yet also of chagrin, and her free-spirited husband, whom she resents for making her give up far more of herself for him than he has yielded in return.

Bobbie Ann Mason is justly regarded as a regional author with an eloquent and seductive sense of place. Here she shows that she can also craft characters so lifelike that they remain a bit of a mystery even to her.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. See ``Bookings," Page D6, for information on a local appearance by Pagan Kennedy.