cover image South Brooklyn Casket Company

South Brooklyn Casket Company

Klaus Kertess. Serpent's Tail, $13.99 (125pp) ISBN 978-1-85242-448-0

Conceptual constructions, mannered prose and a garish display of alliteration characterize this collection of eight short stories composed of the reflections of ennui-stricken, globe-trotting, upper-middle-class gay men. ""Footnotes"" consists of footnotes to a non-existent opera libretto involving the origin of woodwind instruments, wrestling, Greek mythology and space travel. Time and again, Kertess demonstrates his inability to resist the lure of repeated sound: ""Rooms that sparkled with flawless, fulgent grace, lithe limbs leading my awkward ones into a merenge or a mambo; dark, dulcet eyes and crimson-crested smiles adorning flawless skin as succulent as an orchid...."" Occasionally, Kertess melds his pretentious prose with the decidedly declasse, as in the title story (which has no apparent connection to either South Brooklyn or a casket company), in which a man participates in meaningless sex in a sauna while pondering his mother. Loosely tying the collection together is the recurring figure of Peter, a bored jet-setting writer who appears in many of the tales. But neither narrative nor character are the point of Kertess's writing. He's playing the postmodern shell game with meaning. Unfortunately, he does it without humor or distinctive style. In ""Short End,"" he writes: ""Often meaning was completely erased by the autoerotic pleasure that the letters released in the wake of their wayward trails."" Exactly, but it's not even that pleasurable. (June)