Three Goat Songs

In a theater of coastal rocks, before an audience of goats, a man tells his story--about the impossibility of telling his story. Like the rocks, which he describes both as faces and as anal, ``hair-clogged fissures,'' storytelling, he says, consists of fronts and rears, beginnings and ends. And language avails him no devices with which to connect these ``into some single statement worthy of a whole being.'' So the man refers to himself in this trilogy of novellas through a ``cento of butt-ends,'' a patchwork of scraps from others' tales. Brodsky craftily revises the ancient Greek term for tragedy--literally ``goat song.'' He writes not of the individual's flouting of order, the theme of tragedy, but of the individual's desire for order in a unified narrative of the self. Brodsky's prose seems to proceed from the very core of his character's thinking, ``from the site of its eruption.'' Its molten flow consumes all types of language--colloquialisms, legalese, and some eminently obscure vocabulary. The result is a vigorous, eccentric style that enables Brodsky ( Xman ) to bring a Swiftian gusto to the novel of ideas and write a challenging, at times dazzling book. (Apr.)