Fiction
Pussy, King of the Pirates
By Kathy Acker. Grove Press.
Over the course of nearly a dozen novels, Kathy Acker has refined her trademark madness into a kind of method, which consists of 
applying the wrecking ball to some literary classic, then raking through the debris for raw materials. In earlier books she drew upon Dickens, Cervantes, Rimbaud, and Pasolini. This time, Robert Louis Stevenson takes the hit. "Pussy, King of the Pirates" represents Acker's spin on "Treasure Island," although the familiar adventure is buried under an avalanche of dream sequences and erotic interludes. The plot revolves around a cast of interchangeable female characters, who dart from one location to the next. Early on, they traipse through an Egyptian whorehouse, which occasions one of Acker's goofy epigrams: "Every whorehouse is childhood." Later, they inhabit a futuristic metropolis and a girls' boarding school. One woman has an abortion; another has a roll in the hay with Heathcliff, who wanders in from "Wuthering Heights" for a cameo appearance. Finally they reach Pirate Island itself, an icky little atoll where the air is "so odiferous that the clams who were lying in the mud-water below, shell-open, and the fish whose mouths were gaping even though they were dead, could see a wall of smell." By this point my mouth was gaping, too: why would anybody bother with this pretentious (not to mention odiferous) twaddle? Acker's politics are as muddled as her prose. And despite her constant yakking about victimization, the only victim in "Pussy, King of the Pirates" is poor, defenseless Stevenson--and, of course, the reader.
-- James Marcus
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The Book of Man
By Barry Graham. Serpent's Tail.
If ever there was a race less suited, physiologically, to the drinking and drugging so central to its literary culture, it must be the British. Dissolution is the ostensible motif in the works of Malcolm Lowry, Martin Amis, and Will Self, among others -- but the real joke is that their characters just can't stomach what they relentlessly pump into their bloodstreams; they are, despite their hard living, better suited to a cup of tea in a comfy bedsit. 
Vomiting is the running gag (if you will) in Barry Graham's "The Book of Man." The novel details the relationship of Kevin Previn, a young Glasgow poet and playwright, with a heroin-addicted bisexual writer named Michael Illingworth, who was Previn's artistic mentor in his student days. Illingworth has died from AIDS, and Previn returns to Glasgow to research a BBC documentary about him. The novel begins as a series of emetic flashbacks: the pair first meet in a disco when a drunken Previn vomits on Illingworth while the latter is sitting on the toilet; of course they become best friends. Previn knows it's love with his wife-to-be when she vomits on him after sampling Illingworth's heroin (in Scotland, love obviously doesn't mean having to aim better). They have a child, whose bodily functions are also explicitly-detailed.
"The Book of Man" is, despite its interest in excreta, both liberal-hearted and sensible, a sweet-natured tale with a decent, likable hero who is just trying to sort it all out. No Amis-like schadenfreude here -- Previn loves and respects his mentor, even though Illingworth refused to see him in the last ten years of life (his attempt to overcome his drab Glasgow origins). A little more self-probing of the non-bulimic kind would have turned an interesting story into a shattering one.
-- Scott Baldinger
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