Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!

Chronicling the inner life of a fiercely independent, idealistic outsider, this intriguing but obscure experimental novel explores the paradoxical nature of human consciousness in a perplexing, ever-changing world. Frieda, the narrator and eponymous ""daughter,"" opens the novel, speaking as a fetus from an Edenic state of unbounded freedom and perception in which she can ""create anything."" Her bliss is short-lived, however; she is soon ""tricked into being born"" in an elaborate, glitzy ceremony involving costumes, musicians and flamboyant choreography. The stylized expressiveness of the birth ceremony is meant to invoke a mythological inclusiveness, but the effect is fragmented and elliptical. From there, it's all downhill for Frieda; each successive chapter finds her a few years older and increasingly stifled and dissatisfied, with her stream-of-consciousness raging unabated. She spends her childhood biking through her drab hometown in Northern California. As a teenager, she hopes to provide humankind with a glimpse of the Divine through a career in nude modeling, but her plans are dashed by an unscrupulous photographer. She flirts with a bohemian lifestyle in Chicago, but soon grows impatient with the inability of art to make an immediate, lasting impact on social conditions. An emotionally abusive marriage and boring desk job are followed by her ignoble, lonely death in a trailer park. At every stage of her existence, her idealism punctures her determination, rendering her capable of little but turgid rumination. But there are occasional flashes of philosophical brilliance and surreal humor in Chapman's (Our Plague) prose that amply reward the reader's attention. Ultimately, the novel leans too heavily on the already burdened legacies of Faulkner and Joyce (and the protagonist's namesake, Friedrich Nietzsche) to be praised for its originality, but the stream-of-consciousness narration, which shifts in style and tone as Frieda ages, provides its own unique momentum. (Sept.)