Lip Service

Hedonistic Hungarian Maya Gabor, a butterfly tattooed on each buttock, was a female dog (i.e., bitch) in her last incarnation. Living in London, she overstimulates her precocious son sexually and becomes engaged to Bunny Selveratnam, a Hindu guru/erotic arts master who's adept at regurgitating goldfish and bananas. Bunny operates as a courier for a shady garbage company and gets mixed up with movie types like Medusa O'Toole, star of The Waltzing Werewolves . Maya's son procures small-breasted, depilated Caucasian girls for a Japanese banker, until a turn of events finds him on the run, with a corpse stored in his deep freeze. In a raunchy, screwball first novel that is occasionally hilarious but eventually wears thin, Anglo-Indian Lucas short-story writer ( Evenings at Mongini's ) uses improbable, farcical, sex-obsessed characters as props for extracting absurdist humor from extramarital affairs, whores, johns, the hereafter, racism and much else. The convoluted plot, stretched too far by Rabelaisian exaggeration, holds a hatful of surprises, including a wild, lc per web oedipal voyage of discovery. (May)