The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

THE GUARDIAN Wednesday July 13 1994 Paperbacks 10 I Sadness of the suburbs Original Brendan 0'Keeffe The Ice Storm, by Rick Moody (Abacus, THE 1970s one of a host of American cultish "Personal Growth" books was called Predictable Crises of Adult Life. This could be the subtitle to Rick Moody's ode to the inescapable sadness of the suburbs. Moody, a young American seemingly influenced by Updike but without his glossy sheen, stands in slyly funny judgment over his venal, Watergate- era WASPS, as if saying: "You are not OK. Take my word for it you are not OK." In 1973 New England, the Hoods are a family weak on family values. Benjamin, an increasingly puffy brokerage media analyst in his late thirties, has "figured out that love is Stuck in a failing marriage, but at odds with the stayloose, get-mellow pseudo-carnival of promiscuity, he stumbles into "confusion, estrangement and drunkenness." Elena, his icy wife, reads Eric Fromm and feels socially insignificant at parties.

She knows Ben is unfaithful but feels guilty as one of her faintly hippyish selp-help books assures her, "You are the cause of whatever ill you Gulls and gooks Science fiction David Langford City Of the Iron Fish, by Simon ings (HarperCollins, C4.99) THE city inhabits a metaphysical biosphere, a microcosm in which life includes seafood, gulls and salt breezes, yet no sea. Exotic rites preserve it, but are slowly failing. After one exhilarating trip to his world's ragged edge, the hero settles for years of fin de artistic life replete with gay sex, public sex, etc. The narrative grips again towards the apocalyptic finale, which rewrites (without resolving) the cosmology. Well-written and unusual.

The Original Dr Shade, 1 by Kim Newman (Pocket Books, FIFTEEN offbeat stories: some are japes, some hit hard. The quasi-fascist 1930s "Dr Shade" comic strip is revived in the Thatcherite 1980s, and actively resists liberalisation. Senator McCarthy hunts real witches. The US Army maintains a traumatic beachhead in Elfland-turned- Nick Kimberley Round Up Nicholas Lezard To the Land of the Reeds, by Aharon Appelfeld, trans Jeffrey Green (Quartet, CO) IN 1938, a Jewish woman and her son travel slowly from Austria to her Ruthenian homeland; as they get nearer, they find that the Jews are disappearing. This, as Bernard Levin points out in his introduction, is one of the few works of fiction to get the measure of the Holocaust, probably because it is only implied; a restrained, desperately moving and chilling work, written with the simplicity of allegory and the force of history.

Misreadings, by Umberto Eco (trans William Weaver, Picador, £5.99) INTELLECTUAL whimsy, skits, pastiches; a publisher's reader writes scathing reports on Proust, Joyce, Kafka, de Sade (not enough sex); one "Umberto Umberto" confesses his lust for an aged Eco reviews the new 50,000 and 100,000 lire notes work as pure sign of itself. This collection holds up remarkably well, considering the pieces were written for an Italian audience, 30 years ago. It helps if you have read I promessi sposi. And Finnegans Wake. An Officer's Wife in Ireland, by Caroline Woodcock (probably) (Parkgate, A CURIO: initially published anonymously in 1921, this is an account of the Bloody Sunday assassinations from the perspective of an officer's wife billetted in Dublin.

Not too well written (unless it's a cruel, Grossmithian spoof, in which case it's written very well indeed), but that's hardly the point: what the memoir offers, in spite of itself, is a clue or two about the current mess. Read Ernie O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound for the Sinn Fein case. Power and the Throne: the Monarchy Debate, ed Anthony Barnett (Vintage, C5.09) ESSAYS, pro- and anti monarchy, from Charles Moore, Martin Amis (two measly but accurate pages), Richard Hoggart, Marina Warner, Tom Paulin, Christopher Hitchens (my hero), Fay Weldon, and others. It's quite fun seeing so many people getting worked up and suddenly knowledgable about the constitution; Shirley Williams's essay (pro; monarchy's is to consult, advise and turned me into a republican in three seconds flat. Sugar Cane, by Paul Bailey (Penguin, A VENEREOLOGIST meets a rent boy who is trying to trace a friend dying of Aids; he tells his story, and that of the stable of young men kept by a fake bishop who asks them, in return for food, secure lodging, and a kind of education, for occasional "sausage Deftly tragicomic, it's not just a state-of-the-nation novel but a state-of-the-human-soul novel, shot through with a deep humanistic sympathy.

It 1 made me blub. NEW AUTHORS PUBLISH YOUR WORK ALL SUBJECTS CONSIDERED Fiction, Non Blography, Religious, Poetry, Children's AUTHORS INVITED Write or sand your manuscript to MINERVA PRESS 2 OLD BROMPTON RD, LONDON 8W7 300 Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature and the Visionary, by Michael McClure (University of New Mexico Press, 2. 00831 ICE ICE Moody. STORM Rick Mood Marin County or San Francisco she might have gone the way of transcendental meditation, meaningful interaction communes and Zen jogging. But this is more secluded New Canaan, and anyway Moody is too skilled to reduce the 1970s to pastiche.

Two teenage brats fill out the family. Thirteen-year-old Wendy is sexually precocious; the older Paul is a comic-reading, pot-smoking, unsavoury loner given to phrases like "Flame The plot hinges on a ghastly partner-swapping party that Ben and Elena attend, and the apocalyptic storm that follows it. The party is If Elena lived in McFadden's. Vietnam, massacring hobbit gooks. An occult private eye's greatest case conflates sick building syndrome, capitalist black magic and the ITV franchise auction Newman entertainingly reworks our world.

Heart of Shadows, by Philip Williamson (Legend, STANDARD fantasy fare, one of several "Chronicles of When the accursed stone called Heart of Shadows goes astray, a shape-shifting nasty with bad breath is soon in pursuit and lots of people's hearts are duly ripped out. All this stems from a politically correct creation myth: Adam was wicked and Eve nice, so naturally she tore out his heart. Ultimately, evil is overcome -or is it? Colourful, inoffensive, insubstantial. A Land Fit For Heroes 1, by Phillip Mann (VQSF, IN this freshly coloured alternative world, a rigid Roman Empire still rules 1990s Britannia. Solar powered maglev transport carries citizens to bloodthirsty Games in a high-tech amphitheatre, while vast forests conceal a gentler, magical, Celtic society.

Initially there's far too much exposition by the omniscient author; the pace improves when three fugitives from Roman justice flee into the greenwoods, there to learn the dread truth that two sequels follow. The Death and Life of Superman, by Roger Stern (Bantam, THE DC Comics superhero universe now rivals quantum chromodynamics for sheer complexity. Here (novelised from a dire comics series) is the latest, revisionist Superman burdened with flashbacks, potted histories of far too many characters, and endless gut-busting fight scenes which lie leadenly on the page. abound: even in chaste prose, the mindless, bestial Superman-de- one of the funniest set-pieces you could hope to read, worthy of Heller or Roth. A hip rector psychobabbles to an earnest teenage truth-seeker about eternal verities in the work of Kurt Vonnegut.

Elena cries in the bathroom, consoling herself with the "thought" that "most of us have mood changes as each part of our Parent-Adult-Child makes its contribution to our Moody's unsentimental but unmisanthropic voice registers acutely the qualms, self-contradictions and indeterminacies of erotic and domestic life. And the hypocrisies: the scene in which a man justifies adultery to some teenagers in the manner of a salesman's pitch is particularly painful. Less assured is the attempt to invoke 1970s common objects as temporal documents of the spirit of the age. The Hoods live in the era of atrocious taste: Switched on Bach, "Impeach Nixon" badges, David Cassidy posters, shag rugs, Chariots of the Gods. These allow you to laugh in a superior fashion, but also smack of a pile-'em high approach to surface emblems.

The narrative wobbles a little at the end, as Moody tries to finish what is only his second novel. That he hasn't yet achieved mastery of tone is really a quibble, since The Ice Storm is one of the wittiest books about family life "a bluff, a series of futile power grabs" ever written. In synchronising public and private crises it demonstrates, mesmerically, the historicity of even these heedless, wasteful lives. stroyer called Doomsday guards his modesty with tight-fitting trunks. Lycra, no doubt.

Merlin and the Last Trump, by Collin Webber (VGSF, THIS quirky, humorous fantasy is a debut novel with certain lapses of timing, proportion and awful poetry. But it's an interesting and rather satisfying mix, involving the Arthuriad, time travel, paradox, demons, Armageddon, sperm banks and plus sufficient toughminded plottiness to avoid this genre's malady of staggering from joke to joke while the story vegetates. Several droll punchlines appear. An author to watch? Ars brevis GoD! IT SOUNDS LIVE THE PLOT OF ONE OF THOSE GHASTLY JEFFREY ARCHER NOVELS! TOP TORY IN INSIDER DEALING SCANDES AN ESSAY included here on the poet Gary Snyder, McClure talks of Snyder's "practical visionary poems that can be touchstones and stepping Elsewhere he asserts that "All the arts have the same function to maintain a state of Neither notion has much currency in this country where, with honourable exceptions, discussion of the arts is technical, domestic or fiscal. Poetry provides ironic standup routines, or pictures for the mantelpiece, or it fills a gap in the page layout.

But "state of "Practical No thank you very much. Too risky: too ambitious too American. Born in Kansas in 1932, Michael McClure went to San Francisco in 1954, where he discovered a world of poetry that was politically committed, technically virtuosic, shamelessly public. In 1955 he took part in the Six Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg gave the first public performance of Howl. The flyer for the reading promised "all sharp new straightforward writing remarkable collection of angels on one stage No charge, small collection for wine and postcards.

Charming Charming event or not, some view that reading as the birthplace of the Beat Generation. McClure was a peripheral Beat, just as he was peripheral to the writers associated with Black Mountain College, or with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance; yet his work shares certain characteristics with each group, including an affinity for painters, film-makers, assemblagists and musicians: a community of artists. Time and again McClure refers to himself and other writers as Artists, the capital A implied if not stated. At its best McClure's poetry often in the form of plays or novels is electrifyingly animistic, hallucinating a perceptual continuum that runs from the DNA molecules that shape our physical selves to the most distant galaxies. For McClure, poetry is a kind of sympathetic membrane vibrating along that continuum.

The "state of crisis" which he envisions sometimes forces him into a beast language pre-existing the merely verbal: "GR000H0000R GR0000000 SHARAKTAR" as one memorable line has it. It would be easy to decry McClure as a "know-nothing in Norman Podhoretz's famously wrong-headed putdown of the Beats in the 1950s. In fact McClure is an intuitive gnostic. His sense of our physical being is nurtured in part by a long friendship with geneticist Francis Crick. His poetics are as ready to draw on William Blake as on Artaud or Jim Morrison.

His masterwork may be his early 1960s play The Beard, an incantatory and erotically supercharged verbal duel between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow. None of which amounts to a recommendation of Lighting the Corners, in which sycophantic interviewers encourage McClure to narcissistic reminiscence, and a veil of self-aggrandisement obscures the scattered The tone of cosy celebration is at odds with the notion of "practical visionary nor is there much sense of a "state of For that, we need to turn to the writing itself. GR000H0000R. University of New Mexico Press: John Ramsay Marketing, 0423 568313.