Lucnlence

Lunar Attractions By Clark Blaise Doubleday, 305 pp., $8.95 Lunar Attractions is a glomerate, membranous, liquid novel: edema in the most delicate human tissue: mensual; suggestive of fecundity. The word I have in mind is luculent: it means clear, logical, yet it has a sensuous and glossitic sound: it can’t be said aloud without starting saliva up. Lunar Attractions will reverberate: plectra in it for each bass chord of the soul. A marvelous thing, is what I’m trying to say.

There are people, children usually, for whom the most routine act of sight is voyeuristic: a lungfish seen, a father’s head hair, a map contour even. No event or item can dissociate itself from their torrid innocence: from chthonic mystery. David Greenwood, Clark Blaise’s protagonist—aged five through 17—is that sort of voyeur. All surfaces return implicit sensuality to his eye. Blaise has denuded Greenwood of cultural or intellectual bias, so that he can narrate without preconception. Greenwood, for example, is ambigu-dextrous: not right or left, just, well, impartial. His physique, over 12 years, will refuse to adjust its hormone diet in any definitive male-or femaleness. Greenwood is fact-gatherer: data hoard: he cannot, until Blaise’s last page, begin to synthesize or judge. An improbable reporter, yet pivotal in life as the unassuming number 3.14159 is in geometry—and in all modern perception.