Your Name Here: _________

The theme of naming--its difficulty, its arbitrariness, the potential for multiple names--grounds Mazza's new novel, paradoxically, by unsettling it. In this narrative of female rage, the ambiguity of abuse and the difficulty of negotiating a meaningful life as a woman in America, the author of Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? stays with themes she has handled provocatively in the past and continues to work with passion, insight and a certain cold beauty. By jumping back and forth between a letter she is writing in 1989 and her journal entries from a decade earlier, the narrator (who takes on a different name in each of the two time sequences) keeps returning to a sexual incident so traumatic that it is only hinted at through most of the novel. In this way, the narrative reads like a psychoanalytic monologue with readers taking on the position of the silent analyst. Mazza has an uncanny ability to create sadly real dialogue between the narrator and a man she desires. And her portrayal of the narrator's internal monologue is virtuosic (``I came back, Garth, I never left you. You said forever and meant three months. I knew it was three months but thought it meant forever. Why didn't I leave first? Last week, two weeks ago, or way back... when I first realized you hadn't kissed me yet?''). Although one senses an implied connection between the narrator's confusion, pain and sharply intuitive response to a complexly abusive world and that of women more generally, Mazza's touch is fortunately subtle. (Apr.)