by Douglas Woolf

(Dalkey Archive Press) $13.95Douglas Woolf's name is not well known--at least outside the literary excavations of English grad programs--and this is a crying shame, because Woolf, who passed away in 1992, wrote of the layman, for the layman. Eschewing linguistic gymnastics and esoteric academic references, Woolf's sentences were brief and incisive, displaying the writer's uncanny ear for human speech--not the highly studied, stylized speech of Carver or Hemingway, but honest voices, the kind one will actually hear on the street (whereas I doubt one would ever hear Carver characters speaking outside of a Carver story).

This is how I'd describe Woolf's genius: He takes the everyday, the mundane, and presents it in such microscopic detail that it becomes a perfect mirror of reality, so much so as to render "reality" unrecognizable. His is a world that is close-but-not-quite, in which characters drink "Pipsi" and a jazz band plays right before "Betsy Smith" appears as a demonstrator at the auto show. This distance allows Woolf a space for a cultural critique that is never belabored or polemical; Woolf's light touch and gentle wordplay ensure that it is alternately humorously terrible and terribly humorous. This is where Woolf differs from other social satirists or the newest onslaught of "angry young men": He possesses none of the nihilistic vitriol of Jonathan Franzen or the gleeful megalomania of Eggers or Pollack. There is a great tenderness turning at the core of Woolf's work--a genuine love for his characters and humanity in the specific case, if not the aggregate.

"Listen: there's a hell/of a good universe next door; let's go," wrote e.e. cummings, and Douglas Woolf got right on the bus. When he arrived there, however, he found that this banal new world offered little in the way of improvement; in fact, it was remarkably, eerily similar to our own. Yet in these two novels, Ya! and John-Juan, which were first published by Harper & Row in 1971 and kindly reissued by the good folks at Dalkey Archive Press, one gets the sense that Woolf never stopped searching out those small improvements, recording them faithfully for "manunkind," who has left him for dead in deepest literary obscurity: "Animals have more hope then men. They don't know. Do they care? Men care, and know. It's almost too much for them. They want to stop. Don't stop, don't stop, whatever the lure. Who knows who then will care?" Who knows, indeed? KATE PREUSSER

Baise-Moi

by Virginie Despentes

Translated by Bruce Benderson

(Grove Press) $12Called "one of the most controversial French novels of recent years," Baise-Moi--the basis for the movie of the same name that was banned in France for its graphic nature--suffers from the curse of flashing through 244 pages of shocking scenes, then collapsing under the weight of undeveloped characters and a storyline that exploits your sense of repulsion and nothing else.

The book focuses on two women: Manu, vile street trash with foul manners and a body she retreats so deep inside that even getting brutally raped doesn't faze her; and Nadine, a masochistic prostitute who loves porn and also lives deep within a protective barrier that doesn't allow passion to stay long in her life. A couple of murders, robberies, and the aforementioned rape bring these two social misfits together at a train station; from there, they take off across the country in a brazen crime, sex, and killing spree that pushes them further to the extreme with every taboo they violate. By the end of the book, author Virginie Despentes has left little untouched--from incest to the murder of the young and innocent--except the formation of a meaningful storyline.

In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis used shock value to his advantage in American Psycho, a book that describes a murderer's incredibly violent crimes within a searing critique of yuppie posturing. Although the scenes in his book are stomach-churning, in the end you're left with a larger concept than just tagging along with a serial killer and his insatiable blood thirst: The book is as much about the banality of the lifestyles of the rich and famous as it is about your own visceral reaction to descriptions of brutal torture. In Baise-Moi, that larger concept (and larger world) is completely absent, and the murderous duo are as slate-blank at their demise as they are at their introduction. JENNIFER MAERZ

Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara

by Joe LeSueur

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) $25In The Last Avant-Garde, David Lehman's definitive biography of Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch--the mid-century poets known as the New York School--O'Hara is portrayed as an alcoholic and a promiscuous homosexual who wrote "offhanded poems that seem as disarmingly immediate and perishable as telephone calls," each of them possessing "two parts melancholy, three parts joy." Lehman's descriptions of O'Hara are astute and adequately electric, infused with vividness and surprise--that is to say, with life--which is an appropriate homage to a poet whose ear was tuned to the brisk, brittle chop of colloquial phrases and who wrote, almost exclusively, pell-mell but somehow penetrating portrayals of others and the city.

Now we have a new book about O'Hara's life and work, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara, by Joe LeSueur, who lived with O'Hara from 1955 to 1965. A poem by O'Hara begins each chapter, and then LeSueur endeavors to clarify the context and content of the poem--but not assiduously or with any sharpness whatsoever. In his provision of anecdotes and quotidian facts, LeSueur blunts the ebullient enigmaticism that is essential to an ideal reading of an O'Hara poem. Perhaps LeSueur's essays stand out as exceptionally maladroit because they're about a man who did more than most American writers to invigorate the expressive power of language.

A typical flat-footed LeSueur essay is the one following "To the Film Industry in Crisis," a poem in which O'Hara chronicles his lurid love for the movies: "Mae West in a furry sled,/her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolf Valentino of the moon,/its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer..." LeSueur's ensuing "digression" is one of empty platitudes and flat reductions that subtract from the thrilling brilliance of the poem itself. "What can I say that might illuminate this heavenly poem?" LeSueur starts off with a thud. "Not much; it speaks for itself, and speaks with great eloquence, wit and precision because of its authentic and evocative details...."

This book is poorly written and intellectually worthless. If you want something to illuminate O'Hara's poems, read The Last Avant-Garde. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

(Ballantine Books) $23.95When we first meet our hero in Earl Emerson's Into the Inferno, he is naked, toothless, and perched atop a police car with dozens of guns trained on him, including the pistol he is holding to his own head. Jim Swope--a small-town firefighter and father of two--appears to be having a bad week.

We rewind to the beginning of the week, and learn that Swope's desperation has been brought on by a mystery syndrome that's turning North Bend firefighters into incurable, lifeless imbeciles. Into the Inferno is not, as the title implies, an action thriller chock-full of gritty firefighting scenes. It is a suspense novel, following Swope's race for the antidote before his brain turns to pudding.

Swope is the doppelgänger for Emerson, himself a North Bend resident and Seattle firefighter; perhaps it's that personal connection that keeps Emerson from making Jim Swope the unlikable shit Emerson seems to be trying to make him. If Swope is meant to be an antihero, he's one who will still retain the reader's sympathy. We are inclined to look past Swope's rampant womanizing because he's such a loving father to his two little daughters, who were abandoned by their drug-addicted, lesbian mother. We are inclined to give Swope a pass after learning about his childhood in a Capitol Hill cult. As Swope counts down toward his own demise, the reader becomes a de facto therapist, listening to Swope's incessant self-loathing. But if this is deathbed reckoning, it seems halfhearted. It's an apology of the "I can't help it if the chicks dig me" sort.

Emerson is not covering new ground here, either with the mystery syndrome (unleashed by a big, bad corporation) or the "death of small-town America" theme that pops up throughout the book. But Into the Inferno is a thoroughly entertaining thriller. Crime fiction buffs will solve the book's mystery quickly enough, but the book's final two chapters strike an ambiguous tone that can only be described as beautiful--a pleasant surprise tucked at the end of an otherwise typical, fun, macho whodunit. ANTHONY YORK