Imago Bird

Bert, the precocious 18-year-old narrator of this inventive, wickedly amusing coming-of-age novel, comforts his alcoholic Aunt Mavis (an eccentric who drinks in the nude), makes love to his Trotskyite girlfriend in the afternoons and tells his female psychoanalyst how he locked himself in the bathroom at age seven. Then there's Bert's Uncle Bill, who happens to be the prime minister of Great Britain, which may explain why spies and security men seem to follow Bert everywhere. Also unusual is Bert's stammer, which symbolizes hisand the author'sconviction that ordinary language is a poor medium to convey the ``network of connections'' called reality. The author, son of the late politician Sir Oswald Mosley, shapes a narrative the way a nuclear physicist might track a quantum experiment: in thousands of discrete moments, recording his character's immediate sense impressions, the gap between what they speak and what is churning within. First published in England in 1980, this strikingly original novel grew out of Mosley's Catastrophe Practice , a collection comprised of three experimental plays and one short novel ( Cypher )an omnibus volume which this publisher will release simultaneously. (Mar.)