Games of the Blind

The passionate yet jocular life-testimony of Paul Avery, a psychologist in prison for murder, fills the provocative but ultimately disappointing pages of Sullivan's third novel (after The Correspondence ), a tale of madness and sexual obsession that owes (perhaps too much) to Nabokov. The greatest heat here rises from the narrator's description of his earliest fixation, an older woman with whom he fell in love when he was 14 (``I looked at her from across the foyer, and I was flooded--every chamber, every hollow, every infinitesimal space of my being--by longing''). From this epiphany, the story speeds along as Avery draws scenes and characters with the inflamed incisiveness particular to the mad (``My heart was a fluttering wren in my rib cage; my breathing was labored; my blood roared in my ears.'') Avery is too clearly descended from Lolita's Humbert Humbert, however, and Sullivan's prose, though nimble and often startling and hilarious, falls short of Nabokov's mastery. Moreover, the plot grows slack as it draws to its murderous conclusion. The climactic homicide seems inevitable rather than compelling, and Avery's frequent comments on his condition leave little room for conjecture by the reader. Still, Sullivan is a talented writer, and in her protagonist she has captured the pitiful hilarity of obsession: ``I wrestled with serpents and tried to get fleas to stay put in a hat.'' (May)