Apples+oranges CL

Formidable intelligence mixed with personal confusion is often a recipe for interesting reading. Clausen begins her story by stating that, after ""a dozen years of intense coupledom"" with a woman, she ""got involved with a man."" This book is both a personal ""effort at mending a broken identity"" and a more general attempt to describe human sexuality as fluid rather than fixed. Clausen recalls her essentially untroubled 1950s Pacific Northwest childhood. Her first sexual experience with a woman came freighted with her ""political commitments"" as a feminist and ""growing reputation as a poet and novelist,"" and she freely admits that, as part of the feminist generation that came of age in the 1970s, she ""hitched eros to ideology."" She seems, however, unaware that, when she broke with the lesbian community after falling in love with a black male attorney on a trip to Nicaragua, she continued to link her sexuality to her politics. For example, she sees the search for bisexual and for biracial identities as similar in kind and refers to herself as ""a tragic mulatto of sex."" Her prose, while often stunning, carries a defensive tone as she jumps through logical hoops to retain her leftist and feminist bona fides. But her depictions of life in America in the '50s, the activism of college students in the '60s and the development of lesbian feminism in the '70s is fully engaging. And she comes by her confusion honestly, through an earnest, literate wrestling with the intersection of the personal and the political. QPB selection; author tour. (Mar.)