cover image From the Steam Room

From the Steam Room

Robert Nichols. Tilbury House Publishers, $18.95 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-88448-129-4

Oddly comic meditations on metropolitan decay, social heterogeneity and global finance undulate through this turbid novel of contemporary New York City. Banker Helix Glowlight, head of the Municipal Rescue Corporation entrusted with bailing out bankrupt New York, calls on his friend Roderick McBladder, president of the Global Bank, for a loan to help rebuild the city's crumbling infrastructure. The two bankers' unlikely correspondence--they exchange poems, describe recent dreams, sketch prose caricatures of their colleagues--makes up much of the narrative, which is also punctuated by Helix's intermittent retreats to the eponymous steam room, where he versifies and reflects on his own grandeur. Nichols ( In the Air ) employs a variety of prose styles to heighten the novel's dream-like quality. He evokes New York with dark lyricism, effectively parodying government and financial institutions and personifying the self-absorption of the rich and powerful in the engaging character of Helix. Despite some stirring images and provocative metaphors, however, the resulting whole fails to satisfy, its insights diffused by the peculiar structure the author so skillfully cultivates. (Sept.)