FICTION

THE FLORENTINE PAPERS by Thom Palmer (Peregrine Smith Books: $17.95; 154 pp.). This inflated but flavorful souffle of a first novel can be boiled down to the most basic of plots: 1) Boy meets girl. 2) Boy grows fat eating the girl’s cooking as she writes what will become a best-selling book on the delectations of spinach. 3) Boy loses girl. But as the girl, Maria Perpetua, would say: Why boil a souffle? And as the boy, Thom Palmer’s nameless narrator, would add: Without poetic elaboration, the pain of unrequited love is nothing more than heartburn.

Especially since the boy is, in fact, a poet, who makes his living selling paper cups of shrimp at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. He seems as committed and self-absorbed as any of his breed. What a surprise for him, then, to discover the gender roles reversed. In the clash of creative egos, his is like a balsa-wood boat splintering against an aircraft carrier. Maria is much tougher, more focused, more market-wise, more ruthless in the way male artists have traditionally been to their women, willing to use him as a muse and discard him when the project is over. Palmer leaves us, in turn, with the taste of rue, seasoned with laughter.