BOOK REVIEW : Mapping a Child’s <i> Terra Incognita</i>

“Let me put it this way, I’m after a real nowhere,” explains Curtis White in “The Idea of Home,” a book that should not be mistaken for a memoir or an autobiographical novel. “Live like a madman, go beyond all limits, go wherever you please.”

White casts his memory back to a Bay Area suburb that he calls San Lorenzo--”Every lot a garden spot”--and conjures up the scenes of a California childhood in the 1950s and early ‘60s. But, like surrealist painter Rene Magritte, the author warns us against taking his reminiscences too literally.

At first, as White ruminates over the mental landscape of his childhood, he manages to evoke some impressions that will resonate with readers of his generation: the smell of “sour milk and fish sticks” in an elementary school lunchroom, “playing Little League and cutting classes,” tossing toy grenades at “Kraut-Japs with that stiff-armed lob you used to see on ‘Combat.’ ”

But White is not merely retailing his own childhood. The whole enterprise of “The Idea of Home” is loftier, several steps beyond “Happy Days” and a thousand light-years from the California Dream.

“The Self is an interesting Abyss to fill,” the author muses. “But fill it with what?”

What White dumps into the Abyss appears to consist of random anecdotes, conversations with childhood friends, letters to himself and miscellaneous dreams and nightmares. Now and then, as the author works himself into a trance, the book turns into a lurid historic-erotic phantasmagoria. It is a memoir in the form of a fever dream.

One moment, White is aloof and ironic: He gives us the player stats for one memorable World Series of his childhood and titles it “The Condition of World Spirit, October 1962.” And the very next moment, we find ourselves hurtling into a literal abyss where we witness a weird massacre in the Indian territory of the 1870s that flashes forward to the Warsaw ghetto and the killing fields of Cambodia and ends between the thighs of a yuppie lawyer named Maureen who suddenly turns into an avenging Buffalo Woman.

Or we are lured into a colorful tale of Enrico Caruso and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, only to discover that the woman into whose bed Caruso is trying to insinuate himself may or may not be a vampire and that the rising tide of San Francisco Bay is filled with impossibly vile things that may or may not be the imaginings of a runaway lunatic.

“Nothing in San Lorenzo was what it appeared to be,” rails one of the characters in White’s nightmare tales. “There are corners in this town where the veneer has warped and you may peel it back if you are brave and then what splendid creatures you’ll see!”

Or White simply sheds the burden of metaphysics and allows his well-crafted prose to turn into boogie-woogie: “A smart arm swept the bottles, glasses, the little plastic umbrella from the Bimbo’s mai tai, even the cigarette filth on to the floor and with one murderous jerk of the loins there was a riot goin’ on,” he raves at one point.

White is intrigued with the archeology of memory, and he invites us into a kind of Dream Time when history itself had not yet come into existence. As we trek across this surreal terrain, we might encounter Joe McCarthy, or Madame Nhu, or Charlie Manson, or someone--or something--with no name at all.

Indeed, “The Idea of Home” is best understood as a map of a particular terra incognita, a map that leads us into the territory of Curtis White’s peculiar vision without ever quite showing us the way out again.

THE IDEA OF HOME, by Curtis White , Sun & Moon Press, $12.95, 203 pages