The Spectacle of the Body: Stories

Strange, glittering, incantatory language marks Holland's debut short-fiction collection. These odd, occasionally impenetrable pieces were not written for narrative addicts; though certain events do occur, they are seen only hazily through a mesmerizing--and sometimes fustian--web of words and style. In ``Orbit,'' a brother and sister offer alternating impressionistic accounts of the summer when their father abandoned their dying mother, leaving them alone on the family farm. Looping, cadenced sentences (``I did not have shoes. I did not have Bingo with me going there or coming back, and coming back I came by foot and I did not have shoes.'') convey the anarchic rhythms of this macabre idyll. ``Delicious,'' a disturbing exploration of the undercurrents of--among other things--the relationship between a waitress and a restaurant customer, is narrated almost entirely in wickedly accurate restaurant lingo. The brief but chilling ``Winter Bodies'' concerns a ritual act--possibly a highly personal sort of last rite--carried out by a man upon the drugged-out and/or diseased body of his lover. ``The Change in Union City,'' one of the collection's more accessible stories, is the chronicle of the declining fortunes of a small town and its most colorful, vital inhabitant. If they can get past the gothic excess, sophisticated readers will enjoy the challenge of these provocative, nearly hypnotic stories. (June)