THE SENSATIONIST

For this tale of sexual obsession, the author of last year's behemoth historical melodrama The Quincunx has slimmed down to 160 sparsely printed pages by the simple expedient of leaving out everything that might make his story worth telling. A young man (barely and grudgingly named David) arrives in a nameless city to take over a new job shrouded in secrecy. Amid dark hints by his friend Magnus of sharp practice by his boss Telling, David pursues a cryptic series of sexual conquests, pausing only momentarily to explain that ``intimacy with strangers was the most exciting thing he knew.'' All his womenGretta, Lindsay, Joanne, Cindy, Lucymelt into one another, presumably by design, as David, despite his all-too-justified fear of intimacy, is borne along into a destructive relationship with the most unlikely of them all. But Palliser's niggardly withholding of detailsnames, places, even feelingsdeprives his parable not only of a circumstantial context but even of an atmosphere apart from its own minimalism. Anorexic fiction from a novelist who can carry weight better than most. For short takes on sexual obsession, stick with Josephine Hart's Damage (p. 67) or Paul Theroux's Chicago Loop (p. 139).