The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 67

BOOKS FICTION The word is worth a thousand pictures By WiU Self ECLIPSE FEVER by Walter Abish, Faber 14.99 Bonny, a 16-year-old runaway, experiences both the US and Mexico at a more visceral leveL Her tangent takes her from a fundamentalist motel-owner, via a Hassidic Felasha to the Yucatan. Here, sick in her hotel room, she witnesses the eclipse of the novel's title on CNN. Alejandro is like a quicksilver bead of self-consciousness moving through the historical self-forgetting of the 20th century. He has never visit- Insider's view of life on the inside By Sara Ranee JANICE GENTLE GETS SEXY by Mavis Cheek Hamish Hamilton 14.99 JANICE GENTLE is fat, naive, obsessed by chi-valric love and writes best-selling romantic novels. Sylvia Perth is her agent, tough and manipulative, who creams off the unworldly Janice's income for herself.

Rohanne Bulbecker, young and thirsty for power, has been despatched by Morgan Pfeiffer, ruthless New York publishing supremo, to persuade Janice to make her books sexier. This jolly novel is not without insight and some nice turns of phrase which is just as well, for the self-referential knowingness of a writer writing satirically about a writer of romantic popular fiction can be unspeakably irritating. How Mavis Cheek's agent must have chuckled at the spot-on portrayal of grasping literary agents; how her publisher must have enjoyed her searing expose" of the publishing world; how any down-and-out would enjoy reading of Erica von Hyatt's descent into drinking and prostitution, which lead her to Sylvia's plush flat and eventual redemption. This book is supposed to be about love: you. too, it suggests, can find the kind of love that allows fat recluses from Battersea to make music with publishing moguls.

It is also about personal growth: thrusting executives learn that money isn't everything and art should be defended. Mavis Cheek is too sharp a writer to be allowed to get away with this kind of fluffy nonsense, and she is aware of it numerous references to medieval literature come over as "I might write tosh, but I'm much cleverer Perhaps she too was persuaded to write something that will sell, and unlike her heroine, succumbed. ed the US, but has built up a picture of its magnificent ordmariness entirely from film. Nevertheless, when he summons up an image of his own cuckolded self, it is the cretinous husband in Chabrol's Le Femme Infidele that Alejandro seizes on: "Idiot, idiot, he kept repeating. The epithet an expression of his chagrin, aimed at what he had not explored." There is nothing arch about the way Abish intrudes such allusions into his work.

When Bunuel's use of two actresses to play the same character in That Obscure Object of Desire makes its appearance here as the substance of an argument between Alejandro and his best friend Franciso, it is greeted by the reader as an old acquaintance. In Eclipse Fever film is eaten up by life and then expelled in little farts of recollection. Throughout the novel Alejandro's identity folds in on itself. So does his memory, and so do the very sub-clauses that Abish rivets together with his functionalist punctutation. Speech here is always reported in the historical present.

Parentheses are abandoned this is the realm of the interjection where dashes intersperse the banal, the ridiculous and the profound. For Abish, language is still freighted with the technical taint of the Tmctatus. Words are so many little pictures, each corresponding to another reality. Emotion cannot be fixed by them it can only well up between them. It is a mark of a great cinematographer that when you leave the cinema you find yourself cutting, panning, tracking and composing in the same manner.

How much more heady is the impact of a novelist who can do this at the level of ideas? But Abish, unlike a populist film maker, doesn't simply produce snapshots to be passed among the mass. He tears treasured portraits from our culture's family album and thrusts them into his cunning slide carousel. Clicking from one page to the next, we reflect not on the death of literary fiction but on its vitality. ONE OF the more asinine arguments advanced during the recent "death of fiction" debate was that of Gilbert Adair, who opined that in the production of "artemes" key artistic ideas which graft themselves, as motifs, onto the lives of the mass literary fiction has become notably defunct. In tbe 20th century, Adair asks us to believe, the torn shower curtain in Psycho has trumped any potential literary artemes from the off.

Walter Abish is a writer who hatches artemes the way a frog spawns with apparent ease and in great quantities. He is also a writer who takes from film and renders unto it In three dimmish works of fiction, some poetry and now this relatively chunky novel, he peers into the lens of the projector as it spews out imagery. Thematicalry, he has circled around the core of the United States, though at a careful distance like Kafka, who wrote Amerika without visiting the country. In Abish's earlier Minds Meet the central character. Marcel, opts for extra-literary retirement in Alberquerque.

With Eclipse Fever, Abish goes further south still, to Mexico itself, using a traditional narrative lens to focus his thematic beam to a scintillating point. Alejandro, the hero, is at the tip of a pyramid of deracination. He is doubly compromised, having betrayed the American financier Preston Hollier in one of the shuffles of the corrupt tarot that constitute the auspicatory game of Mexican politics, and also lost both his critical and sexual integrity to Jurud, the American novelist who has been screwing Alejandro's wife Mercedes. Mercedes also happens to be Jurud's Spanish translator. Alejandro may faintly despise the work of Jurud, a New York Jewish intellectual, but this doesn't stop him agreeing to fete Jurud on his forthcoming trip to Mexico.

By the same token Franciso, Alejandro's best friend, cannot resist a commission to "write something favourable" about Preston Hollier's plan to put a lift in the Pyramid of the Sun. Meanwhile, Jurud's daughter Water Abtak: Math of the border, down Mexico wijr IN BRIEF and, for all their anger, there is at the centre of these stories a great gentleness. Anita Mason The Centre of the Labyrinth by Philip LJoyd-Bostock, Qaartet D635. The late author might have appreciated the thought that his only novel is four parts logorrhoea to one part gonorrhoea (or rather, that sinister sibling. Aids).

His gay protagonist, Jerome, enjoys a joke against himself; he may, he muses, be "the worst cruiser since the General but more than jokes, he loves words. Just as each word suggests to his vast erudition some classical, biblical, literary, historical or filmic allusion, so each sexual partner suggests the next. Poignantly, Jerome Lloyd-Bostock need not have been so wary of dull confinement; tbe final quarter, devoted to his dying, pares away rococo excesses; his courage and chivalry shine the brighter, and he commands all his reader's sympathy. Verity Mason A Different Sea by Claudio Magria, trs MS Spur, Harvill 12.99. In isolated, ocean-torn Patagonia, Enrico confronts tbe glass universe with desireless impassivity, fearing and demanding nothing.

His return to the Adriatic alters perception; in Thirties and Forties Europe there is something incomplete in a man ascribing compassion to value-systems and defining love as a having, not a being, verb. "Teach me to care and not to Enrico dies grasping only one arm of that paradox. A slim but satisfying novel of ideas from the author of Danube. Verity Mourn A Mirror for Larks by Victor Sage, Seeker 9.99. Slow-moving novel narrated by Raymond, an ex-public school wide-boy who hasn't managed to make money on the turf.

He and bis girlfriend Zonda are lured into an international credit scam by an Irish-American fraudster. The novel develops through a morass of negotiations bland, they're b-i-g. Health and wealth for all? Hannah needs to wise up before she becomes a very late presenter of the show. Pharmaceuticals, farming and fanaticism are your topical tips to unravelling the mystery. Verity Mason Afghan Stories bv Oieg Yennakov, trs Marc Rosaaao, Seeker Ten unsparing stories by a young writer who served in the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Yennakov writes in terse and sometimes blazing prose about the conscripts' lives, about casual atrocity, the hallucinatory moments of conflict, the different ordeal of the women who wait and the patriotism of stay-at-home apparatchiks. Above all, he writes about Russia and its countryside with passionate lyricism. Tbe soldiers' dialogue doesn't translate well, but the voice is fresh and authoritative, with dubious banking contacts and Third World royalty, all conducted in bars, restaurants and hotels. Raymond finds himself footing the bill, but it is Zonda who pays the ultimate price. There is too much of everything in this novel: the turf talk, the money talk, even the comedy could all have been sharper.

Leslie WUson FatJaadi by Sarah Duaat, Hamish Hamiltoi 1439. A second outing for Hannah Wolfe, the private investigator. A Chandleresque narrator like Hannah knows that rich, pouting, unhappy 14-year-old girls spell one thing. But when it hits, it's worse than usual two-thirds of the family deleted. Dad's work seems to be tbe problem; cancer research is not popular with animal liber-ationists and in the past he bred a better pig.

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