Mosaic Man

Like a classic rock band's 10th comeback album, Sukenick's latest avant-garde fiction invokes predictable precursors, leans heavily on outdated machismo and seems designed to show readers how hip, and how persecuted, Sukenick thinks he (still) is. Mosaic Man reads much like an addendum to Sukenick's memoir, Down and In, which traced the demise of Village bohemia in the '60s and '70s. Most of the new work tracks ""Ron""'s search for his Jewish roots; section titles allude to those in the Hebrew Bible, where the Five Books of Moses (here, ""Genes,"" ""Ex/Ode,"" ""Umbilicus,"" ""Numbers,"" ""Autonomy"") are followed by ""Prophets"" (here, predictably, ""Profits"") and ""Writings"" (""Hand Writing on the Wall""). ""Ex/Ode"" alternates a Robert Crumb-like fantasy about Captain Midnight with pages of rather sweet transcribed and taped conversations among ""Ron"" and his mother and relatives. The later chapters brood on anti-Semitism and Jewish identity. ""Numbers"" evokes the residual bigotry Sukenick encountered when he lived as a student in Paris, and throws in some repellent, misogynist anecdotes. ""Autonomy"" brings Sukenick through modern Poland, where he meditates on the Holocaust, and then (in the book's high point) to modern Israel, where a spooked Sukenick cluelessly wanders about seeking the Golden Calf, which archeologists have (supposedly) just unearthed. The final sections return to cartoonish and Vonnegut-esque fantasy, with left-wing sermons about poverty and crime. After the rapes and gangbangs of Sukenick's Paris, these straightforwardly moralized arguments seem out-of-place; meant, perhaps. to counter Sukenick's narcissism, such passages simply demonstrate it again. (Mar.)