BOOK REVIEW : MYSELF AND MARCO POLO<i> By Paul Griffiths</i> Random House $17.95, 274 pages : Answering Rhetorical Questions

Since “Myself and Marco Polo” is a book made up of rhetorical, philosophical questions, let me begin by asking a few myself: Is it at once possible to be a part of the avant-garde and yet remain squarely in the mainstream? Is it possible--at the same time--to be both clever as the firefly and dull as mud? Is it possible to be, in outlook, at once a Young Turk as well as an Old Fud?

Yes. Yes it is. “Myself and Marco Polo” manages all this as well as registering within the reader the responses of both extreme age and extreme youth. By Page 10 of this thing, I felt at least 105 years old: Haven’t I been exposed to these so-called philosophical questions since time began? By Page 266, as a character earnestly remarks: “A statue is a representation of a person, even as this body walking beside me is a representation of you. If I touch your arm . . . do I touch you, or do I merely touch your arm. Surely I can never touch the you that is a breath within your mind. . . . Is it in your mind that the sun warms? . . . Then in those respects your mind is congruent with those of the lizard and the tree. You are perhaps not so young as you imagine.” Well, the authors write about that one. Because didn’t most of us cover that material back in lower division philosophy? Wasn’t that a long time ago, even if it was only last semester? That’s why I feel 105 years old when I read this book--stuck, paralyzed, drowned in the eternal moment of reading a novel where plot, character, time and place and prose style and everything else that should go into a novel have all become subservient to the primary purpose of proving the cleverness of the author.

At the same time, reading “Myself and Marco Polo” on a summer afternoon makes me feel five years old. When another character opines: “Truth is not to be our itinerary. But perhaps there is in that a kind of realism. If we strive for truth, we are bound to lie. Whereas if we set out instead to produce a fabrication . . . If one has regrets, I suppose they are a sort of egoism.” When a character opines that sort of thing, you begin to think of the lawn out at the back of the house. And you could turn on the sprinkler out on that lawn. And if you were 5 years old you could run through that sprinkler, and you wouldn’t have to be reading this book.

But no, as the Chinese proverb says, “There is no help for it.” You’re in this book, and you’ve got to read right on through. The year is 1298, but as the author suggests, “You speak as if the past had the reality of another country, as if there is notionally a place called 1298 to be visited and inspected.” The real Marco Polo is in prison with a fellow named Rustichello, who proposes to ghostwrite his fellow prisoner’s memoirs.

This brings up every possible question about geography, commercial success, truth, lies, the nature of knowledge, as well as fast-forward vignettes in the form of contemporary restaurant reviews, and fancy Venetian businesswomen who work with Olivetti word processors, and offhand references to the Golden Gate Bridge. Marco Polo recounts some of his adventures in Peking, including a visit to a place where Guardians of information read that information, and then destroy it so that the human race will know less than we started out with. Travel literature is satirized. The kitchen sink is thrown in there somewhere.

But listen. There is an audience for this book. Rebellious, alienated high school kids; the kind you see on television commercials--kids who do unwholesome things like talk back to their parents and stay in their room alone a lot. Wrap this book in matte black paper and tell them you finally see things their way. You’ll have them back outside, running through the sprinkler, in no time.

Next: Sam Hall Kaplan reviews “Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape” by Michael Hough (Yale University Press).