Close Your Eyes and Think of Dublin

Newcomer Thompson appropriates the style and spirit of James Joyce, with a strong feminist twist, in this novelistic portrait of the author from birth to womanhood. A bibliography cites both Ulysses and Ludwig Bemelmans's children's classic Madeline ; the narrator is a Madeline-like Catholic girl with an oceanful of rebelliousness whose memories of growing up, however, have little of childhood innocence about them. Rather, they brim with religious misery, literary allusions and dark, abstractly dirtyabstractly dirty seems a bit strained/mc/stet/pk sex. Thompson's stream-of-consciousness prose spills out in torrents of verbiage, demanding that readers sift through and puzzle thesepk out. At times they may still be left bewildered. Rage (toward men and nuns, among others), humor and a love of words are evident throughout as the narrator describes her awakening sexuality, her grandfather's death and visits to her psychiatrist: ``Hobbies? Lots! I've got microfilm and microfiche; can trot a horse, milk a moo, macrame and tae kwando, bocci and ben wa, hoola hoops and chains; whipped cream and wafers, body and blood; been educated, masturbated, vaccinated, been no commas/pk depressed repressed obsessed possessed . . . '' sound like bob dylan/mc (Oct.)