Reportingthe UniverseE.L. DoctorowHarvard University Press:125 pp., $22.95”Did...

Reporting

the Universe

E.L. Doctorow

Harvard University Press:

125 pp., $22.95

“Did you and Dad realize,” the young Edgar Doctorow asked his parents, “you were naming me after an alcoholic, drug-addicted, delusional paranoid with strong necrophiliac tendencies?” “Edgar,” his mother replied, “that’s not funny.”

And so began the writer’s life as a writer, named for the “greatest of our bad writers,” Edgar Allen Poe. It is not altogether a glorious fate: “The fiction writer, or the poet, of today assumes a more modestly hopeful role in this society, like someone with a green card.... We are a cottage industry in a post-industrial world.” Doctorow admits to faking his very first journalism assignment in elementary school: an interview with a made-up character named Karl, the made-up doorman at Carnegie Hall. “Today I would explain to the teacher that I had done no more than what journalists have always done,” he shrugs. Doctorow believes in fiction over fact, in the mysterious source of literature, which brings him around to God and then to politics. “In the course of my own life,” he concludes, “I have observed that the greatest civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt.”

*

A Girl From

Zanzibar

Roger King

Books & Co./Helen Marx Books: 320 pp., $14.95 paper

In Roger King’s novel “A Girl From Zanzibar,” Marcella D’Souza is an East African Asian who finds herself teaching “multicultural studies” at a small college in snowy Vermont, reflecting on her life as if from a great distance. She left Zanzibar for England in 1983, age 25, with a British U.N. worker, spent six weeks with him, got lost in London, spent eight years in jail and now tries to teach earnest students the world is a large and dangerous place. She’s sarcastic, distrustful and alone. She lives only to create a resting place from which to go back into the world and find the one person she has truly loved. Even as she tries to make sense of her life, the strange melting pot -- that surrounds her and is a part of her -- confounds her: “Disorder is the only order we can’t see, and coincidences are the evidence.”

*

A Night of

Serious Drinking

Rene Daumal

Translated from the French by

David Coward and E.A. Lovatt

Tusk Ivories / The Overlook Press:

121 pp., $13.95 paper

“TO be read before use,” instructs Rene Daumal in his foreword to “A Night of Serious Drinking,” his book-length hallucination, written in 1938, first translated into English in 1979 and now reissued. Not that the foreword offers any useful tools for navigating the book. From then on we are left to wander : like Milo in “The Phantom Tollbooth,” like the Little Prince visiting the other planets in the galaxy, like Alice in Wonderland, clueless and ruleless in a surrealist’s dream of the various stages of drunkenness.

“It was late when we drank,” the narrator of this novel begins. “And we who were alone were many.” The friends gather at the tavern for some serious drinking and are distracted by philosophizing. A voice emerges from the fire. Embodied, it draws their attention by causing a guitar to explode using only the power of words. And they’re off to the races: surrealists on a busman’s holiday through the night.

The narrator spots Rabelais in a nun’s costume in the next room; the voice behind the fire keeps talking. The evening takes a bad turn: “It’s not the end of it when you’ve drowned your black thoughts because afterwards there are blue thoughts and red thoughts and yellow thoughts....” The drinkers are led on a tour of the universe and its various inhabitants: the Fabricants who ceaselessly make things and the Pwatts, the Nibletts, the Kirttiks who must consume a certain number of novels, pamphlets, poems and so on per day (“When they stop reading, they start writing”).

You get the drift. Eventually, our narrator is himself dropped unceremoniously back in the tavern, which is empty. It’s a long, strange trip. There’s no guarantee an innocent reader will return unharmed.