BOOK REVIEWS : Life in a Bleak Post-Civilized World

Better Get Your Angel On by Jennifer Allen (Alfred Knopf: $16.95; 112 pages)

If you stripped away everything that makes contemporary life faintly tolerable, you’d be left with the world according to Allen.

Though she’s heralded as a scribe of the “post-verbal” culture, the state she describes is eerily reminiscent of the prehistoric society so succinctly defined by Thomas Hobbes: “No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

There’s one depressingly crucial difference. The bleak conditions Hobbes described eventually improved, but once you’re “post-civilized,” there’s nowhere to go but down and out. Though Allen, as a “post-verbal” writer, is not geographically as specific as she might be, a close reader can easily deduce that most of these horrific tales are set in California. We’re already here, in the eye of the apocalypse.

All vestiges of love, law and morality are gone, replaced by hatred, violence and mindless lust. Taking this unpromising detritus, the author succeeds in giving us a vision of the immediate future, one so unnervingly close to present reality that the old reliable tranquilizer--”It’s only a story”--doesn’t work.

For one thing, these aren’t stories in the ordinary sense, but mere moments in time and space--structureless and all but characterless, though the environment is all too familiar--the beach, a motel, the freeway, a housing project. Allen creates her fiction out of found incidents much the way the Dadaists made art from found objects, but while they were only teasing the public, Allen is warning us that this is the way life is going to be from now on.

Because her actors have all but lost the knack of intelligible speech, the direction is not immediately apparent. Even so, you get the drift, or perhaps undertow is the better word.

In a grimly sardonic piece called “Dinner,” a monstrous family of three boys, a mother and father are having a meal. The father wants everyone to say grace, which in this context is as unimaginable as expecting a hyena to mind a baby. One son sucks the blood off the strings tying the roast, another drinks blood, a third breaks the furniture. The father hits the kids, curses, and threatens, while the mother endures, saying at the end, “Grace is over,” not only the understatement of the decade but a concise summary of the content of the whole book.

In “Her Name Is Wahoo,” the title character is a dog and the narrator “a hoser of pens at the pet kennel.” Man and dog live in a subdivision so raw that coyotes steal infants. Instead of names, the residents are known by the position of their houses--”the first house on the left.” If you’ve been looking for an effective dehumanization metaphor, your search is over.

Tough customers can proceed to “Chlorine,” in which one character has a crucifix stuck in his nose and other is called Skate-Rat Lance. The whole gang is “spaced out to the max,” enjoying a small-scale race war on the cement-sided river bank where they roller-skate. What Allen’s publisher calls “a linguistic evolution in the very first stages of staking its historical claim” is not only evident here, but already in full flower.

These are all worst-case scenarios, written to be perceived rather than described. We’re dealing here with hyper-reality, and it’s not for the squeamish. Endowed with perfect pitch for the speech of her humanoids, exploiting a macabre and antic imagination, Allen’s 13 projections not only explore the depths of modern life but wallow in them. You join the fun at your peril.