Everyone and No One

Esquire music columnist Jacobson's boisterous second novel (after Gojiro) takes a baffling but imaginative trip from the soul to outer space and back. Narrator Taylor (""the Face"") Powell, is a movie star fed up with his great looks and irresistible sex appeal. He wants to be ordinary--everyone and no one--and he gets his chance when he's presumed dead in a plane crash. But he has survived--and, now that the Hollywood orgies have ended, the allegorical weirdness begins. Rebuilt in the South American jungle by reclusive, Frankensteinian plastic surgeon Vincent Parry, the newly resistible Powell (now drifting along the Texas coast under the pseudonym Dean Taylor) develops a strange power that eventually pits him against the forces of Evil--who happen, in this very peculiar case, to take the form of a gang called Los Muchachos, led by an immortal Darth Vader type named Arana. In the meantime, Dean finds domestic bliss with a devout Christian named Mary. An abrupt 15 years after his plane crash, Dean is improving everyone and everything he touches--except their son, Dyson, who has begun to betray his handsome parentage and holds the key to staving off a comet that threatens life on Earth. All of this is told with such good humor--spiced with such cartoonish sex, violence and religion--that one suspects a spoof, and yet it's never clear just what Jacobson means to ridicule. Although the novel shows no complexity, no care for plot or plausibility, no characters to speak of and no discernible message behind its allegorical face, it is, at the same time, undeniably curious: imagine a chastened William Burroughs in the service of Jehovah's Witnesses. (Aug.)