Mauve Desert

Mauve Desert is the first section in this three-part, postmodern, feminist fiction; in this novel-within-a-novel, 15-year-old Melanie, with a bad case of existential angst, finds comfort driving through the Arizona desert late at night. In the second section Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert , and ``her whole being plunges into the book.'' She thirsts for more than the short novel reveals, elaborates on the setting (photos portray her images of one character), decides to translate the book and imagines a conversation with the author. The final section is Laures's translation, which tells the same story with minor changes. Brossard (coauthor of Picture Theory ) focuses on issues of fiction to the exclusion of traditional development, neglecting concrete detail in favor of ideas and language. Characters speak in a stylized manner: Melanie, for instance, tells her mother ``your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope.'' The novel functions well as a literary game, but the original story is not strong enough to support the meta-literature that follows. Photos. (Dec.)