A New World Like Our Own

...An investigation brings her to the ground-floor cafe, where a man is using a blender to mix a drink that, somehow, seems intended for her...

...The piece is the most verbally brilliant in the book and brings to mind, in the tenor of its wit, another Anglo-entranced American, Alexander Theroux...

...It was time to be practical, for her own sake, to try to create some sense, even a contrived one, of order, in this most peculiar, relentless universe...

...If the eventual showdo wn between Sebastian and a reluctant Sarah in her Byzantine art studio seems somewhat overdone, "Sebastian" is nevertheless rich enough to round out a rewarding trip on one of the less-traveled roads of American fiction...

...If the surreal, picaresque narrative at times wears thin, it still affords a line on which to hang Sebastian's many frequently erotic thoughts and perceptions: "Yes, Sarah, to Sebastian, is exceedingly concrete, and when his mind rises toward her, there is a corresponding ineluctable physical tropism that is utterly straightforward...

...Sarah, on the other hand, exhibits what Sebastian looks upon as a disconcerting spontaneity...

...Page by page the effect can be disorienting, even frustrating, particularly for a reader used to realistic fare...

...Things get very odd before the story's end...

...And by book's end, a feeling emerges of having glimpsed a new world, one with discernible similarities to our own...

...The multiple clauses parallel the many twists and turns Carol faces, and reveal her panic and frustration...

...She was telling him all these things about herself, all the silly thoughts, the things about the architect and the light fixture, how they' d been so long next door to each other and never known each other better, and really she'd never done anything like this before but she was letting him hold her...

...This tale then takes a wry twist: "When I myself cannot sleep, I rise and peer through the paper screen, imagining what is behind the silhouette: the broad silk stripe and the small pink buds, the velvety petals stroked by hands whichmove as if arranging flowers...

...In the novella, however, Caponegro broadens her scope to include more of the mundane...

...Sebastian" employs a premise similar to that of "The Star Cafe": Its protagonist is caught up in a series of events not all of his own doing, yet somehow driven by his psyche...

...Following an arcane pagelong prologue, "Tales from the Next Village" turns out to be a series of short cautionary fables for lovers...

...A number of passages are filled with Revelation-like imagery, sometimes an angel or two appears, and a few characters seem caught in dream worlds...

...The story's length also allows the author time to create, in Sarah and Sebastian, two characters dense with shared history...

...Back in my room, my shameless ear takes in the tiny moans, which build to the cry I know so well: Having heard the faint echo which follows it, I can at last also sleep, and rest my hand...

...hence delinquent behavior...

...Any deviation is automatically perceived as aberration...

...But after a story or two a method of sorts becomes evident...

...one circumscribed set of changes...

...Carol is appropriately surprised and anguished by her circumstances...

...Caponegro is most effective exploring the world of erotic love and its attendant concerns...

...Here, as elsewhere, Caponegro seems to be pointing to the artificiality of her fictional world, confident her talents will hold interest...

...But thanks to Caponegro's adept characterization, none of this stands out as showmanship or an academic exercise...

...There are, for example, Sarah's many nicknames for her fiancé, among them Sea Bass, Sebum and, when they're fighting, Seabastard...

...Yet despite their tone, the tales often have an appealing immediacy and an archness that are a clue to Caponegro's strengths...

...Sebastian mulls over such matters as children, parents, career, art...

...A man is seduced into the sea by mermaids...

...it was her weariness, it was the candlelight, but for some reason she felt compelled...

...Fortunately, this happens only once, in "Materia Prima," the story of a troubled girl who becomes anorexic before turning into a phoenix...

...Husband and wife bicker over who will provide dinner, resulting in their separation for years...

...Sebastian, an Englishman living in the United States, has a bit of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster about him: He is charming, well-off and slightly lost...

...The apocalyptic ending, partly related as a play, revives interest briefly, but is too lengthy and concludes on a bitter and repetitive note...

...The first story coaxes us onto this surreal terrain...

...It is a measure of Caponegro's skill that the absurd sequence of events transfixes to the extent it does...

...Sebastian corrects Sarah's pronunciation of Jaguar, her usage of nauseous...

...So starts a chain of uncanny events that draws Carolintotheman'sarms, into his bed, and into one of the strangest bouts of lovemaking in recent fiction...

...With swiftmoving sentence splices, Carol is packed off to bed before an objection can be raised: "She must have imagined that his eyes were unusually bright...

...The Star Cafe" begins its surreal look at a single woman's one-night stand when Carol, readying for bed, hears a strange noise...

...An occasional rhetorical flourish, usually at the end of a tale, adds complexity—as in the case of a suitor, accompanied by others, who finally hears his beloved pledge herself to him after 10 years of refusal: "All is in motion, all is in flight, plum blossoms scattered over the gardens with half-finished embroidery lain aside, so that those who stitched could hear the sound, then see the sight, of the sun and moon colliding...

...first he had held her hand and then suddenly she was in his arms, he was murmuring softly, 'yes, yes,' consoling her, reassuring her, stroking her hair, and then other parts of her, and before she knew it she found herself in bed with him, in the back room, which was not so sordid as it might sound...

...contributor, "The Quarterly, " "Massachusetts Review," "Newsday" Mary Caponegro's first collection has little in common with the run of recent volumes by her story-writing peers...

...A woman marries a man to whom she is allergic...

...The story has a delightful humor to it, a kind of narrative stop-and-go that alternates between Sebastian's very trying day and his pleasant and not-so-pleasant remembrances...

...As in the other stories, much of the play involves language...

...Going to the bathroom becomes an enormous ordeal...

...The tales are set in ancient China, a distance Caponegro reinforces through a touch of formality in the dialogue ("On the contrary, old woman, I bring not contrition, but blame...

...If she strays too far from it, her formidable analytical abilities and formal creativity cannot sustain themselves...

...The title story, while equally challenging, is infinitely more rewarding...

...TheimageofCarol'sloverdoesnot appear in the same mirrors where she sees herself...

...The novella that closes the collection has more thanits shareof moments, too...

...There is a good dose of mythology in The Star Cafe...

...Unlike Wooster, this Englishman is fastidious and proud of it...

...Exits are difficult to find...

...In "The Star Cafe," they do...

...She embarrasses him in public and taunts him in private, though it's usually all in fun...

...It is a difficult patchwork comprising the girl's thoughts or journal entries, excerpts from scientific texts on birds, and a pseudo-scientific narrative that quickly loses comic and empathie interest: "One kind of growing, in this paradigm, has value or validity...

...When combined with the simple, poetic prose of the narrative, the result is often quaint, evoking a feeling of gossipy village lore: "That is why, to this day, we do not pick the leaves from the trees...

...In one, when a husband brings his mistress home, his wife not only tacitly accepts, but at night presents the lovers with an excuse to be alone...

...Erotic concerns are raised as well: Sebastian cannot stop thinking about his fiancée Sarah, returning again and again to memories of their sexual encounters...

...She is beautiful, artistic, and determined to force him to renounce his chauvinism...

...And a lucky thing, because she might not have recognized him, so changed was his appearance...

...Yet the third-person narrative sticks close enough to the protagonist's thoughts to keep a pulse of plausibility beating beneath the weirdness...