No-Body: A Novel in Parts

""Eddie thought ideas got pressed between the pages of a book like fruit,"" writes avant garde theater director Foreman (My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Six Plays) in his first novel. Here, as in Foreman's slippery, intentionally ridiculous plays, Eddie and a cluster of other disconnected characters seek enlightenment. Seriously benighted, they nonetheless sense that they won't make progress by conventional means. (""Global forces were at work, but Eddie was localized."") Metaphysical images and ideas abound in this wildly elusive tale, but they're served up with a strangeness that assumes normalcy-like fruit, instead of dried flowers, smashed between the pages of a book. Eddie is joined by Samuel and other characters with such fabulous names as The Amateur Genius or The Hero Cadmus (each of whom has a wife named Marie and a mistress named Helene). They scoot about their lives, progressing toward no particular end, getting together with friends and family and taking actions that may help them penetrate to some understanding or at least to a new intensity of experience. One character, The Mind King, resolves to use language differently to ""lead him, as it were, into new strata."" Sometimes, Foreman describes things as if he is new to the planet and utterly unaware of context. Willfully upsetting reader expectations, the six-time Obie winner uses words and images not to answer metaphysical questions but to raise them. But raising such questions in such a deliberately gnomic way is an invitation to intellectual laziness. Foreman ignores the elemental law of seduction: even a writer who wants to perform a metaphysical striptease has to make a reader believe in the possible existence of what's not revealed. (Feb.)