FICTION

SUICIDE BLONDE by Darcey Steinke (Atlantic Monthly Press: $19; 176 pp.) . What did the other mothers think? There were eight of us hanging around waiting for our kids to get used to nursery school--one doing needlepoint, one reading Chekhov, one flipping through Time, a couple of gossips, and I, reading a book whose cover features a saucy, naked young woman lighting up a cigarette atop rumpled sheets. The suicide reference is to Jesse’s self-destructive obsession with her bisexual boyfriend, Bell; the blonde to an opening scene in which she dyes her hair in an effort to keep him interested. Suicide also refers to something else, but before you find out what that is you’ll be treated to a scenic drive through a rather remarkable sexual landscape, with stops along the way at a bar/whorehouse run by the cruel and powerful Madison, who captivates the impressionable Jesse until Jesse learns better. What to say? Steinke is a strong writer, but it’s hard to stick with this story of hard-edged sexual alienation and experimentation. Ennui is tricky to pull off; it’s all too easy to sound boring instead of bored, to slip off that knife’s edge into perverse monotony. It’s also a little difficult, in the era of AIDS, not to throw this book down and start screaming, Are you mad? Do you really want to kill yourself that badly?