A Literary Mugging : TALLER WOMEN: A Cautionary Tale, <i> By Lawrence Naumoff (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $21.95; 289 pp.)</i>

Lawrence Naumoff has written a brief and brutal novel titled “Taller Women.” Elliptical and episodic, it progresses in spurts, like a conversation in the weight room: “Did I ever tell you about” --pause to lift and grunt--”this?”

The title emerges from a conversation between two emergency-room physicians:

“I don’t know about men but I am sure women are taller than they used to be.”

” . . . The only change I see in women is that they are happier than they used to be.”

” . . . There’s something depressing about a happy woman.”

“Oh, I get it . . . taller, happier women, and where does that leave us?”

Evidently, in a sexual DMZ.

Reading more like a police blotter than a novel, “Taller Women” details the offenses of both sexes, from petty annoyance to soul murder. Naumoff rounds up the usual suspects--thuggish, insensitive men and dependent, whining women. Paired up, two by two--Monroe and Lydia, Martha and Bob, then change partners and skip to the loo, Monroe and Veronica, Martha and Earl--they demonstrate the petty cruelty of humanity in a series of brief episodes as striking and grotesque as tableaux from a live sex show.

Naumoff’s chapters more closely resemble muggings than literary progressions. We remain with characters or events exactly long enough to see the awful truth. In Naumoff’s vision, there is seldom any other kind. His men are weak and feckless; his women are overpowering--but fools. The focus of all of their interactions is genital. Inevitably this lends a certain myopic fixation to the rendering of events.

Monroe, one of the emergency-room physicians, witnesses much that is bizarre and gruesome; for example, men suffering from “exploding” penises, the result of the overzealous use of do-it-yourself collagen-enhancement kits; women suffering from knife wounds, gunshots, burns--the full panoply of human suffering. Take the night he admitted his friend Martha, who had been gang-raped by her partner Earl’s friends:

“It was a bad night for Martha because the boys got confused by the idea of a woman who would do anything, and they beat her and took her out on the balcony, hung her over the edge, and tied her, by her hair, to one of the railings, so that she took the form, in the night, in the glow of the street lights, of an omen, took the form of an ancient human sacrifice.”

Subtitled “A Cautionary Tale,” Naumoff’s novel may have been intended as a fable illuminating the flammability of current relations between the sexes. In this regard, it sadly misses the mark. We relate not to Naumoff’s characters but to his characterization of them. They may be playing musical beds, indulging in emotional arson and sexual pyrotechnics, but Naumoff is the real star. They are merely devices.

Distanced by his writerly eye into something less than human, Naumoff’s characters are reduced to symbols, more glyphs than characters. There is something askew in this detachment. In his hands, human suffering is rendered merely symbolic. This reduction becomes obscene. There is more to human pain than symbolism, just as there was more to the Gulf War than computer graphics and smart bombs.

In fiction these days we are increasingly asked to deify a hyperfocal realism of physical description over felt experience. As readers, we are asked to detach from our own feelings and enter the soul-deadened worlds of characters who survive on sensation alone--and increasingly extreme sensation at that. Like Brett Easton Ellis, Naumoff is darkly gifted, and clearly relishes his considerable powers of description. The misogyny and violence of Naumoff’s images are meant to be excused. These are as mere field reports, he would have us believe.

“Sometimes when a woman wanted to look hot, and passionate and alive, she made her hair seem fiery and loose and ablaze with light. That was what a woman who had just that second caught fire would look like. But only for that single second.

“Then the hair would burn off, and she would begin to look like a concentration-camp woman, and the skin would melt, and the inhuman sounds would come out of what was left of the lips, and then nothing would come out, because the lungs would be scorched and full of smoke.”

Naumoff’s prose style is vicious and vivid. He is gifted or blighted with an eye for the unseemly detail. Like Diane Arbus, his attention is drawn to the grotesque and tortured. Like Arbus’, his work flattens foreground into background, rendering the middle ground obsolete. Black and white and red all over, his is a tabloid world, a world of extremes, where the freakish is rendered mundane and the mundane is rendered freakish.

Naumoff is self-consciously a modern writer. His is a video sensibility, real footage of real carnage. He is focused, as is currently popular, on surface, on event. His characters barely feel or inhabit their own lives, much less metabolize them. There is a hallucinogenic quality to much of Naumoff’s style, as though his characters have taken THC or bad acid and are living with the aftereffects. Consider Monroe’s description of intestinal pain:

“Ileitus could be a lot of fun . . . the blockage often turned out to be round worms, massed together tight as a ball. There was a strange thrill to opening someone up and discovering the worms.”

Ezra Pound remarked accurately that artists are “the antennae of the race.” This is true, but they are also its scalpels, its instruments of healing. There used to be a strange thrill for novelists to opening people up and discovering something more than the worms. There is, after all, more to humanity than our common fate as worm food.

Beside the tumors of greed, self-aggrandizement and misdirection, there are the marvelous mechanisms of human aspiration, endeavor, courage and kindness. This full spectrum escapes Naumoff’s field of vision. It is as though he is a hypertalented literary android. His programming may include the knowledge of human emotion, but his experience does not.