Making Love to Minor Poe

Interlocking romances, academic jealousy and nuclear waste are the themes in Conrad's sprawling debut novel. Joanne Mueller, a poet, is one of the bigger names at a small Chicago suburban college in Lake Bluff. Once she was a protege of Vivian Reape, a writer with more talent for bureaucratic infighting than verse. Now head of the National Institute of Poetry, Vivian calls upon Joanne for help--or rather, on Jon, Joanne's estranged husband. Jon has an inside connection to a major government-financed project at a proposed nuclear waste dump, the Yucca Nuclear Depository, in Nevada. Since the dump will store toxic waste for 10,000 years, future generations need to be warned of its contents. The government has arranged for an artist, an architect and a botanist to create signs that will be understandable to people in the distant future. Joanne learns that Jon's uncle is spearheading the controversial project; but it's Vivian who is the string-puller extraordinaire, positioning herself as the poet who will be generously commissioned to write the timeless, toxic-warning poem for the site. Vivian considers Joanne her main competition, and manipulates a host of characters to undercut her, but even so, Joanne is selected to write the poem. Meanwhile, Sink Lewis, Joanne's hip, seductive poetry student, is making sexual conquests of the other students, and Joanne's former lover, Walter, has an affair with Rose, a bigwig on the Yucca project. Rose's striking resemblance to Joanne eventually figures in the convergence of the subplots, when radicals plan a scheme that affects all the major characters. Conrad's ability to let one plot spin off another fluidly lends the narrative energy, and though the prose is sometimes cumbersome, the story is ambitious, original and lively. (Mar.)