FICTION

AVA by Carole Maso (Dalkey Archive Press: $19.95; 272 pp.) Give Carole Maso and her publisher an A for audacity. This is an experimental novel that must be accepted or rejected on its own terms. Its heroine, Ava Klein, lies dying in a New York hospital. Sensuous, intellectual, romantic, almost too extravagantly a “lover of life,” she has been stricken at 39 by a rare blood disease. In her last day on Earth, she puts to herself the same questions Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich asked: What does my life mean? And is this meaning voided by my untimely death?

Tolstoy handled these issues bluntly. Maso (“Ghost Dance,” “The Art Lover”) employs a much more elaborate--some might say more pretentious--apparatus. We listen in on Ava’s stream of consciousness, which consists of individual lines and fragments separated by spaces. It reads like poetry. In fact, it is poetry. Denied all the usual navigational aids--plot, character development, chronology--we must plunge into the shifting currents of Ava’s memories: landscapes, cityscapes, food, flowers, songs, dances, scraps of dialogue, echoes of passion and--since Ava, conveniently, is a professor of comparative literature--quotations from the books she has read.

Our problem is that we need to do more than appreciate Maso’s ingenuity. We need to feel the story. And the best way to do this is to read as much as possible at a sitting, resisting the temptation to look up the sources of those quotations in the back of the book. Then, in Maso’s own words, we won’t “interrupt the trance of the text.” We can notice patterns and repetitions. We can piece things together. Ava has had three husbands--Francesco, an Italian filmmaker; Anatole, a Frenchman who died in a plane crash, and Carlos, a young Spaniard. She has close women friends. Her Aunt Sophie was murdered at Treblinka. Iraq has invaded Kuwait on this very day. We begin to feel the rhythm that this novel offers in place of conventional psychology or a realistic description of Ava’s physiological state--a “throbbing . . . a certain pulsing” that points to the act of love as well as to the dwindling beat of her corrupted blood.