Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings by Ntozake Shange (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 81 pp.) : Alex Katz by Ann Beattie (Abrams: $27.50; 91 pp.)

If a text may be illustrated, may a painting be texted? Two recent books by noted artists answer that question in the affirmative but in sharply different ways.

But again, if a painting is to be texted, what kind of text should it be? Is this painting (a writer may ask) the visual equivalent of a lyric poem? Or is it an editorial or a short story or a travelogue? Ann Beattie calls her book on 26 paintings by Alex Katz a “reading” of his work. Ntozake Shange characterizes the “word paintings” of her subtitle as responses in the call-and-response manner of black music.

Neither writer claims to be functioning as an art critic, but Beattie’s book does involve her in criticism, while Shange’s does not. Shange, responding to Patrice Viles’ art necklace, “The Wedding,” writes a seven-page story, “Twanda B. Johnson’s Wedding,” whose first sentence spreads its tail like a peacock: “I married myself today in front of the $6,000 opal next to the $4,000 aquamarine from Brazil where I seduced a taxi driver for the sheer pleasure of such gloriously full lips, licking my forehead at the red lights, long black curls seeping through my individually applied aqua-blue super-long lashes: dew in a tropical place.” Shange has taken Viles’ necklace as a call to fiction and has responded with an exuberant story of her own.

But is it not pure conceit to call such a story a response? I don’t think so. As a work of art, a necklace may be non-representational, but it will always be referential: It refers to the female neck, to adornment and to the settings of adornment. By referring to none of these settings of necessity--as, for example, a graduation gown refers of necessity to a graduation--the necklace refers to all of them in potentiality. It becomes the openest of open invitations to the viewer’s or the writer’s imagination.

Shange has been careful to choose for her book abstractions, montages and highly interpretive photographs that offer just such open invitations. These works have an extremely wide range of potential reference--they might be about almost anything--even as, like dreams, they are intensely self-involved. Shange’s word paintings--poems, stories, visionary fusions of memory and fantasy--match them well. Like Twanda B. Johnson, they may be married to themselves, but so are the works to which they respond. Call-and-response can induce this effect in music--a kind of trance a deux. Shange tries to induce the same effect in pictures and print.

How completely the mood changes when we turn from Shange to Ann Beattie! Shange never speaks in her own voice; Beattie always does. Shange is oracular, oneiromantic; Beattie is analytic, conversational. The writers are different, of course, but so is the art.

The 26 paintings by Alex Katz that Beattie chooses to talk about are all of real people, people whom Beattie might call on the telephone, and indeed not just because they are still alive but also because they live in the same white, upper-class, artistic/literary, Eastern U.S. world that she lives in and writes about. In fact, Beattie did telephone some of them as she worked on this book. She had questions to ask them about what it was like to pose for Katz.

Beattie seems to recognize in Katz an artist who, like herself, has tied himself very closely to a shared, real, “nonfiction” world and yet has not become simply the reporter or biographer of it. An undreamlike fiction like Beattie’s, a fiction that never loses its head and rarely raises its voice, will rightly be read as commentary, as roman a clef in the very broadest sense. Katz’s paintings are also commentary in this sense, visual roman a clef. But even as he gives us the clef by naming his subjects, his paintings remain roman. They are near to but not quite of the nonfiction world. How do they do this? Clearly, the question engages Beattie deeply.

They do this, it turns out, largely by Katz’s enhancement of his subjects’ blocking, in the theatrical use of that word. Who is downstage? Who is up? Who is in the spotlight? Who is not? By a director’s answers to these questions, he can establish a relationship between two characters that will be unmistakable to the audience. So can an artist.

Most interestingly, however, what Beattie learns from Katz’s subjects is that, by and large, he does little direction of this sort--or just enough. To three couples whom he painted as they walked in a forest meadow, his only instruction was that they should touch in some way. One couple held hands. Another walked arm in arm. The third embraced so fully that they all but stopped walking. Katz noticed this, remembered it, painted it. What Beattie notices is first Katz’s noticing and then his enhancement of what he has noticed.

Real life, after all, is like a performance that is blocked as it goes. Someone somewhere is always stepping into the spotlight. Somewhere an embrace is always impeding the forward movement. And high art can be made of catching and freezing just those parts of the blocking that seem to reveal most about the performance as a whole. Beattie does this in her stories. Katz interests her because he does something so similar in his paintings.

There are two kinds of fascination in this book. One is the fascination--the exhilaration, almost--of doing with these pictures what children would do, which is to say: what we all secretly do (we can’t help it) when viewing any picture with subject matter in it. In short, we think about the subjects.

Why is she smiling? He seems so sullen over there. Is he sullen because she is smiling? What’s going on? A child will spontaneously make up a story to fit the pictures in a picture book, or even a single picture. In a gallery, adults do the same but keep it to themselves because they have been taught that the sophisticated reaction to an art work attends to its form, not to its content. Beattie licenses us to attend to the content first, and the effect is liberating.

The second fascination derives from the particulars of the paintings and the pleasure of arguing with Beattie about them. What she notices about the form of a given painting will sometimes lead her to a comment about its content. More often she first notices something about the content--typically, about how the people in the painting seem to have been behaving just at the moment when Katz fixed them on the stage of his canvas. This then leads her to notice--at the very heart of Katz’s art--what he has done, formally, to draw attention to their behavior at that moment or to the condition in which they then found themselves. That there are connections here to photography is obvious. Just what they are is not obvious at all.

The social world of these paintings is, as already noted, Beattie’s own world, and she is a connoisseur of it. Like Katz, she has a certain fondness for its country club prettiness and for its reserve, its good taste. She writes with evident sympathy: “Katz presents the images coolly, and his interest is in formality: in people who are not harried or passionate or in a state of chaos. But one need not enact extremes to be so dramatic that one is convincing.”

About the scene of any given painting--of, for example, Katz’s “The Thai Restaurant”--and her comments are full of knowledge: “The way the woman is sitting, and the way Katz has positioned her in the light, forces us to look at her first. She seems alert and composed, whereas the man is slumped and preoccupied. The couple’s emotions do not mesh in the moment. The space across a restaurant table divides them as surely as a real barrier would.”

But there are things Beattie misses, in particular and in general. In “The Thai Restaurant,” she fails to note that the man’s face is painted in exactly the color of the wall, and the woman’s only a shade lighter. If something may be read into the dividing table, surely something may be read into this fusion of thing and person. But quarrels about such particulars can be endless and mean only that one has been drawn happily into the game. The game, let it be said, is a wonderful one.

Less engaging is Beattie’s failure, as it seems to me, to notice certain large, even defining features about this set of paintings. She speaks at one point, but only in passing, of “the skin in so many of the portraits, which looks airbrushed.” In fact the skin looks airbrushed in all the portraits, and so does everything else. All is viewed as if through cheesecloth or under a coating of powder. Superficial or not in content, these paintings are indeed strangely superficial in form: Their surface has been strangely tampered with.

It may be that Katz can paint in no other way; but if he has made virtue of a necessity, one ought still to notice the necessity. The same goes for what Beattie calls “a stillness about Katz’s work that is difficult to articulate. Looking at one of his portraits is like looking at actors standing still on stage for a few seconds as the curtain rises.”

This is true, but does Katz have a choice about it? Is he remotely capable of presenting a face crinkling with laughter, much less a body leaping in sport? One doubts it. His walks are painfully stiff. The few smiles on his faces are clumsy slits.

The gifts of a painter in whose work motion must always be slowed nearly to a stop and surfaces must always appear veiled may be just the right gifts for the presentation of upper-class sorrow. It may even be that there is something analogous between these paradoxical limitations in Katz and Beattie’s limitations as a writer. She says nothing about this, but then, wisely, she says nothing at all about her own work in this book.

For a word about such a correspondence, one must turn back to the introduction by Abrams editor Anne Yarowsky, who wondered, she tells us, what it would be like “to pair a painter and a fiction writer whose individual artistic sensibilities seemed joined or connected by common concerns and techniques.” Listening to Beattie talk about Katz, we do sense how observation may gather to story in her own work. And in her company, we guess at beginnings before the beginnings of Katz’s paintings. Artists are always saying, and so often it seems rather a pose, that their material dictates to them what will be made of it. Beattie lays this elusive process open with unique skill and conviction.

Abrams reports that Ann Beattie on Alex Katz is the first in a series of which the next entry will be by Mark Strand on William Bailey. Strand may do something more like what Shange has done than like what Beattie has done. Whatever he does, I hope that Abrams will produce his book as elegantly as it has produced this one, in which a superb design by Samuel Antupit, a combed paper stock that is a joy to touch, and perfectly printed reproductions (on fold-outs to facilitate comparison) make for a minor triumph of bookmaking, the most auspicious setting possible for an inspired editorial idea.