RENDERINGS

Sallis, who's won widespread acclaim for his strikingly wayward Lew Griffin detective stories (Black Hornet, 1994, etc.), is also a poet, translator, and literary essayistand now, the author of this slender, unrevealing portrait of an unnamed fictional artist reflecting on his life and loves and coming death. In place of narrative he offers a collage of flashbacks, poems, confessional letters; meditations on painting and writing, sex and the sea; allusions to Keats, Hîlderlin, Rilke, Stevens, Thomas Wolfe; lapidary apothegms (``There are too many people inside me for one of us ever to be lonely''); changes in tense, person, and the punctuation of quotations. The whole project, haunted by insistent metaphors of death (a self-beached fish, the pounding of the surf), recalls Eliot's Gerontion in its crystalline images frozen in cloudy amber. Though far more self-consciously literary than the Lew Griffin stories, this fragmentary prose poem mostly makes you wish for the pedestrian conventions of detective fiction that ballast Sallis's more successful novelssomething like the tail that keeps a kite aloft.