Dra-

With the dreamlike pace of Alice in Wonderland, the darkly comic tones of a Kafka novel and a landscape reminiscent of 1984, the latest installment in Sun & Moon's New American Fiction Series chronicles the nightmarish journey of Dra-, an infuriatingly passive woman of indeterminate age and name, as she searches for a clerical job in a labyrinthine gray city of the dystopian near future. The result is a novella that, for all its literary resonances, will frustrate rather than compel most readers. With a spirit as truncated as her name, Dra-- navigates a bureaucratic hell populated by anonymous, domineering administrators, secretaries and managers, all of whom subject Dra-- (and, unfortunately, the reader) to endless rants on humanity's degraded state. The bureaucrats also demand sudden intimacies from Dra--, who continually receives emotional outpourings from strangers (most of them high-level bureaucrats), as if to suggest that underneath our calm, professional facades, we're only ""pretending to have a grand time!"" Not a new idea--yet Levine's creepy, visceral images (excrement-filled dreams, obscene skin eruptions) find new manifestations for old angst. This is stomach-churning stuff--and mystifying, too. PEN-West Award winner Levine (My Horse and Other Stories) writes hauntingly, but her phantasmagoric prose may not be enough to convince readers to stick with what is too often a tedious, overly cryptic tale. (Oct.)