The Dream Mistress

The simultaneous search for separation and connection mark the conflicted characters' plight in British author Diski's (The Dream Mistress) evocatively textured eighth novel. One night in Camden Town, 46-year-old Mimi stumbles over a filthy homeless woman for whom she calls an ambulance. On a whim, she names the woman Bella. Eventually, Mimi wonders if this could be her own mother, Leah, who abandoned Mimi in deep distress over her husband's desertion. Mimi, a seamstress whose patterns defy design and ""whose momentum is inertia,"" has had it with her lover Jack, ""a motivational capitalist"" and one-eyed philanderer who lies with conviction. Jack hates to be alone, but Mimi's distance forces even him to prefer solitude rather than her company. Isolated, Mimi conjures up various identities for the homeless woman, from her own demented mother to the disfigured victim of a bomb blast, to the miracle worker who loses everything when she can't perform. The early chapters suffer from constantly shifting points of view, making it difficult to follow the narrative. Diski's dreamlike landscape is meant to reveal a many-layered past, yet readers may feel as trapped inside the disturbing vision as a dreamer would be, caught in someone else's dream. The key might be found in the epigraph from Freud: ""those dreams best fulfill their function about which one knows nothing after waking."" Although Diski's descriptions are deft and her paradoxes provocative, ""knowing nothing"" is how readers may feel by story's end. (Jan.)