Notes from Underground

Bogosian ( Talk Radio ) is a mercurial actor, a monologuist of great cunning whose characters are sleazy denizens of the underclass and working-class boors and bigots. This volume includes his first attempt at prose fiction and a recent stage play. The title piece is a novella in the form of diary entries by an unnamed man in early middle age, the product of an atomized and terrified society who watches televison in order to feel that he belongs to something. He smokes cigarettes, masturbates and fantasizes about being friends with Dan Rather. Finally, in a startling turn of events, he kidnaps two small children and takes off for the Midwest. Bogosian creates his narrator in a drolly deadpan voice, a series of rambling contradictions. By contrast, the play is a disappointing set of three disconnected acts linked by a narrator who seems to be an ineffectual, detached parody of the Stage Manager from Our Town . As portraits of an unnamed city at the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the three vignettes are mordant and often on target, particularly the first one, set among winos, whores and muggers. But the targeting of greedy yuppies and corrupt Hollywood producers has a deja vu weariness to it . (Apr.)