Tummyache

In the year 1244, the Persian scholar Rumi met the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz. A brilliant and respected teacher beforehand, Rumi emerged from this collision with the dervish a changed man. Eschewing physical human needs, he threw himself into mystical and ecstatic conversation with his new friend. The result was a souk-ful of spiritual poetry that has touched souls from Manhattan Beach to the Upper West Side.

If you are among these elect, you may find something to meditate upon in Richard Zimler’s latest novel, “The Angelic Darkness.” If, however, you’re the type of person who prefers two weeks in Philadelphia to a single stanza in Kahlil Gibran, then you will certainly want to keep your distance from the whirling pieties of this volume.

Zimler’s Rumi is a thirtysomething San Francisco journalist named Bill Ticino. Self-absorbed, deeply offensive and afraid of the dark, Bill is about as unpleasant a hero to make his way into print since Nicholas Urfe decided to teach in a Greek boys’ school in John Fowles’ “The Magus.” Unless you count Bill’s wife, a lawyer and ice queen named Alex. One wonders what might have attracted two such unappetizing people as Bill and Alex to each other, until Bill tells us what made him fall in love. “She looked as if nobody had ever had a good up-close whiff of her inner ocean, not even the handful of pathetic schmucks for whom she’d unlocked her bedroom door.”

Well, poor Bill’s nose certainly led him astray. Six years of inner ocean whiffing have yanked Bill’s proboscis into extramarital waters while failing to tune his metaphors. “The sad joke,” Bill admits, “was that Alex and I were crippled twins hobbling along over our separate desert landscapes, stepping carefully over the cracked outcroppings of emotions which we’d buried long ago in order to survive our families.” And a horrible family Bill’s is, featuring a brother who wears suspenders, a mother who takes the phone off the hook while she’s watching the O.J. trial and an Italian father who psychologically kneecaps the 10-year-old Bill by showing him a wrinkled penis, a wartime trophy of his African service for Mussolini.

Bill and Alex’s marriage has clearly dried up. She departs. Afraid of his loneliness, Bill advertises for a roomie and gets a dervish. “Peter arrived . . . during a russet and crimson sunset, stepped inside the house with a cautious smile,” and with a hoopoe bird named Maria, and with a Nazi flag, and with a tendency to raise his nose in the air like an otherworldly Christopher Lloyd and sprint across public parks and over private walls toward the scent of anything that reminds him of his native Angola.

And, indeed, Bill soon discovers that Peter is not quite of this world, that his angelic good looks and curious sensitivity have been sent to guide Bill on a journey to a boyish Brazilian chanteuse named Maria, a girlish transvestite named Rain and across a sexual Rubicon that--although this is San Francisco in the late 1980s--dares not speak its name. Although the “russet and crimson sunset” might be the first sign that literary trouble is brewing, Bill and Peter immediately bond over one of Peter’s favorite fetishes--one that Bill initially mistakes for an elaborately painted belt until Peter identifies it as a 6-foot long painted tapeworm that had been removed, with some delicacy, from the posterior of a young Goanese boy. Had this tale been written by, say, Redmond O’Hanlon or Michael Palin, or even Gerald Durrell, the reader would respond appropriately. But Zimler’s writing is so poker-faced that one doesn’t know quite how to react except, perhaps, to post the extract by e-mail to a dozen close friends in the hope that it might brighten their terminals.

Zimler, who, like Bill, was born in New York and then moved as a young adult to San Francisco, has spent much of the last decade living in Portugal. One can only assume that his absence from these shores is at least partially responsible for the stark and elaborate awfulness of his writing. One wants to applaud his desire to marry mysticism with serious literature. He after all attracted a host of readers to his first novel, the 1998 “Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.” If “Last Kabbalist” wanted to share a bookshelf with Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum,” then “Angelic Desires” shows a serious hankering to move in next to “The Magus.”

Yet mysticism, whether it be Persian, Christian or Jewish, can attract serious writers--like Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Merton or Naguib Mahfouz--and pathetic schmucks sniffing for “inner oceans.” The Kabbala, for one, prescribes severe penalties for such sniffing. Ignorant tampering is worse, apparently, than simple ignorance. And that is, perhaps, why “Angelic Darkness” leaves this reader as cranky as a Goanese boy with a 6-foot tapeworm.