Displaced Person (C)

Novelist, poet and scholar of the Beat movement, Holmes compares himself to Jack Kerouac (""We were Transcendentalists with hangovers''). Once Holmes pulls away from his New England roots, his overblown style yields to steady, insightful prose. A self-described ``radical without an ideology,'' he almost expatriated to Europe during the Vietnam war. Visiting Germany, a ``terrible labyrinth of extremes,'' he contemplates the nightmare of modern history. He tours Venice (``like frozen Mozart''); makes a pilgrimage to the town where Yeats lived in a restored tower during the Irish Civil War; spends evenings in London with ``sullen Mick Jagger look-alikes.'' Death and change stalk him on Montmartre's streets. Back in the states, Los Angeles, simultaneously dying and coming to birth, jolts him into reality. These impressive travel essays by the author of Nothing More to Declare and Get Home Free whet one's appetite for more. (November)