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- - - - Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
- - - - SECTION: Section 7; Page 16; Column 1; Book Review Desk LENGTH: 471 words HEADLINE: Books in Brief: Fiction;
BYLINE: By Jennifer Reese BODY: It was barely a year ago that Dave Eggers burst into the spotlight with "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," his oversized, self-conscious and showstopping memoir about raising his young brother after the deaths of their parents. Trailing him onto the stage came McSweeney's, the idiosyncratic literary quarterly and Web site he was producing out of a famously messy Brooklyn apartment. McSweeney's lacks the mainstream appeal of Eggers's memoir: it was, and remains, an incubator for abstruse, droll, often satirical bits of writing. Now come the first two works of fiction from the new McSweeney's book imprint. Like the magazine, the novels are handsome, smartly written and deeply eccentric. Consider LEMON (McSweeney's, $16.50), Lawrence Krauser's first novel, which tells the story of Wendell, a corporate memo writer who, after his girlfriend leaves him, becomes obsessed with a lemon. He notices the fruit lying in the foyer of his apartment building, picks it up, pockets it and soon finds himself mooning over it, bathing with it, taking it to work, rescuing it from a colleague's cup of tea and, perhaps inevitably, making love to it. He tapes it to a seesaw and he and the lemon "ride for hours, then fall to the grass and lay in its rustling till daybreak." Krauser, who is a playwright, has interspersed scenes of Wendell and his lemon with elegant ruminations on the cultivation of lemons and descriptions of contemporary cubicle life. His prose is immaculate; his premise, patently ridiculous. This book is odd, exquisite and trivial, like a drawing on a Ping-Pong ball or an etching in a bar of soap. THIS SHAPE WE'RE IN (McSweeney's, $9), a novella from Jonathan Lethem (his novel "Motherless Brooklyn" won a National Book Critics Circle award last year), is equally bizarre and somewhat less polished. Henry Farbur, a hard-drinking and wisecracking retired general, lives with his wife in the boring "subburrows" (a euphemism for bowels) of the mysterious shape referred to in the title. He spends his time mixing cocktails and hovering over his barbecue, willfully avoiding troubling questions like "What is the shape?" And "What is the destiny of its inhabitants?" He is gradually coaxed out of his complacency after he learns that his estranged son has been seen begging in the vicinity of the shape 's eye. This very slim volume recounts Farbur's quest, through the murky bars, orgies, spine and lungs of the shape, to find his son, as well as a fabled "third eye" that will offer a revelatory glimpse of the outside world. It's hard to become too deeply involved in Farbur's odyssey and what it might or might not mean; the story feels rushed and underdeveloped. It's also witty and inventive. Like "Lemon," it's a clever but minor exercise from a talented writer. Jennifer Reese http://www.nytimes.com LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2001 - - - -
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