FICTION

MY MOTHER: DEMONOLOGY by Kathy Acker. (Pantheon: $22; 268 pp.) Kathy Acker writes in code. Her 12th novel, “My Mother: Demonology,” with its relentless barrage of sex, violence, politics and religion, is, in fact, a code of subversiveness and disobedience. There are also secret codes. Acker’s style is a kind of extreme, surreal shorthand, her own emotional alphabet, that can’t be followed in the traditional, linear way.

Laure, the novel’s protagonist, is desperate to merge completely with her lover, B., but just as desperate to find who she is without him. The plot, if it can be called that, travels through dreams and memories, monasteries and universities. There’s even a fractured and strangely beautiful retelling of “Wuthering Heights.”

The key to enjoying “My Mother: Demonology” through all its incarnations, is to read with feeling instead of intellect or (intellect). (Acker is fond of putting words in seemingly random parentheses.) Surrender. It’s OK to miss literary allusions. It’s OK even to miss large chunks of story. What makes this book powerful is the archetypal punch behind each image, a punch that comes from an unknown assailant dressed in red and wearing brass knuckles. Only Acker delivers it that way.