UTAH

Olson's outlandish novels (Seaview, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame) are, at their best moments, balanced with a risky imagination that can send a reader beyond incredulity and into fascination. Here, however, the scales don't come even close to the horizontal: in a mishmash of "deep-image" episodes and pretentious, unbelievable monologues ("The memory. To ferret facts out of that mire, to draw conclusions, as if the vividness of the facts could make them real events and not just colorful constructions that remain constantly suspect") and randomly lurid tableaux, Olson has come up with an unintentionally hilarious piece of work. The protagonist is David, a masseur who was left by wife Lorca and then spent almost a decade as the roomate of a fashion designer named Anson—a man we're asked to believe David didn't realize was gay until he surprises him in bed with another man (and then later when Anson contracts AIDS). Anson's body after his death is spirited off mysteriously to Utah, where David goes in pilgrimage/search, giving massages on the way to old friends and clients, all of whom at the end—Anson in his grave; Lorca as a bee-keeping painter; a member of the Catholic hierarchy recently sprung from the closet (a massage client of David's in New York); and groups of various friends—are reunited at a Utah artist's colony through a series of coincidences that would have made O. Henry blush. This grand reunion is climaxed by a mass massage that Olson clearly means to be an apotheosis of supra-sexuality, but that a reader can read only while biting down on his or her fist to stifle the giggles. Olson, in fact, begins to seems the literary equivalent of the all-flash contemporary realist painter Eric Fischl: an essentially voyeuristic imagination that doctors itself up in the trappings of emblematic meditations on sex and mystery. Beneath it all, though, it's fiction lite-style, with precious little that's original or meaningful.