In this darkly inventive second work of fiction, Graziano (The Love Song of Monkey
) deposits his protagonist among the despairing crowds of an institutional hell. At first, the narrator, a thin man known as Sage, shares a tiny, dank cell with a woman and man, Rose and Henry Greene, so-called because of the “color” of their voices. Locked together in such close quarters, the three grow intimately close, even loving; when Sage later digs a hole in the concrete and they push their way out, they eventually lose one another in the mad flux of other cave dwellers. Sage follows the herd to the feed trough, learns how to jostle savagely for the hard biscuits (stamped with an H: hell or heaven? Sage wonders) and even feels a kind of comfort within the mob: “the warmth of universal inclusion.” His curiosity gets the better of him as he wonders what's behind the light holes in the ceiling: eternal freedom or eternal isolation? Graziano's grim allegory interrogates human existence with its visceral, sensuous description. (Nov.)
