FICTION

THE AMERICAN WOMAN IN THE CHINESE HAT by Carole Maso. (Dalkey Archive: $19.95; 199 pp.) Nobody Move. Vita Sackville West is not dead. She is alive and well and living in the body of Carole Maso in New York. Sex and travel, the literary genre best loved by cafe rats and jobless creative types the world over, is almost dead but still kicking. It just gets harder and harder to imagine that tender-wristed people can still have a poetic life on the high-wire between nervous collapse and romantic passion. Or that they have delirious sex with people they meet on trains (and in cafes and in bookstores and on beaches and . . . hmmmm). Maso’s obsessed heroine, living in exile (Paris, where else?) has just been abandoned by her lover, the woman of her dreams, who can no longer “be a slave to her genius.” Not to mention all the cheating. For the next few weeks she cries, she writes letters and she “meets” people, especially a beautiful young man named Lucien. They don’t talk too much, but they have a wonderful time in bed. “I realize that I am living in the last moments before I become resigned to everything forever,” she writes. And of course, just when they are really starting to fall in love, someone must leave. It’s a book that begins and ends in a flash of light, with a clatter of voices all speaking French. In between is silence, a glass of wine, a knife, a dark room and a lot of passion.