WAYFARING AT WAVERLY IN SILVER LAKE

McCourt brings back the eponymous movie star protagonist of Kaye Wayfaring (Avenged, 1984) and her opera diva mother-in-law (Mawdrew Czgowchwz, 1975) in a tour de force of language that will delight some while leaving others frustrated by the submerged characters, plot, and sheer difficulty of the read.

The seven linked pyrotechnic fictions—none with the shape or structure of a traditional story—are organized around three conceits: to stand as representations of the Seven Deadly Sins; to make parallels between Hollywood mythology and other—notably Irish—mythologies; and to record Wayfaring’s life from 1984, when she fails to get an Oscar nomination for Avenged, to the day about a decade later when she is expected to receive the award for a film based on her disturbed (and disturbing) mother’s life and suicide in Georgia. Along the way, she stars in a film shot in Ireland that has roles for her young twins and Czgowchwz; she’s a hit in the rock band her husband Tristan—years her junior—formed with his twin; she has memories of Norma Jean/Marilyn and is horrified by exploitation of the dead star; her son (also Tristan, also founder of a rock band) comes out, painfully, as gay, journeys cross-country and nearly dies of an overdose. The narrative emerges through gossip, letters, speechifying, speculating, pontificating, and storytelling, with jumps from one character to another, shifts in time and place, and dialogue often unattributed. McCourt has fun with specialized jargon—semiotics, Freud, anthropology, astrology, video games, and more—especially in unexpected contexts. Characters never stoop to plain speech. (“How much more satisfactory . . . is immersion in the study of long barrow, curses, avenue, and row—providing evidence of artificial horizons for crosswise viewing from both sides of a single mound—read bicoastal life—and lengthwise viewing directed over a contrescarpe burial chamber, extending cosmic symbolism into the realm of personal liturgy: read one’s career.”)

Like being regaled by an eccentric Joyce devotee: a reader feels both exhilarated and trapped.