Art Lover

Caroline, a novelist and poet, returns from an isolated artists colony to Manhattan, where her widowed, art-historian father has recently died. As one strand of the narrative follows her rediscovery of the city--and of a friend diagnosed with AIDS--another follows the characters she creates in her prose; interspersed throughout are reproductions of pictures and newspaper clippings that inspire her. This narrative cord ruptures with the introduction of ``Carole,'' the persona of Maso, and descriptions of herself at work on the novel while her own beloved friend is dying, Carole/the writer's art incapable of saving him. Despite its trendy structure and themes, this work is steered by anything but a narcissistic postmodernism. Maso ( Ghost Dance ) is not content to muse on the relationship between life and art; she brings to life a ``bombardment of images and sounds,'' fashioning a pattern of astonishing complexity and beauty. The tough-mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating. (May)