With their terminal ennui, casual sex and hip detachment, Sydney-based writer Wilding's blase characters seem right out of Southern California, yet Australia, land of menacing emptiness, is the setting of these 14 stories. The best and most powerful entry, "The Man of Slow Feeling," concerns an accident victim slowly regaining his senses, for whom sex is a disorienting nightmare. In "Beach Report," a surreal, comic-book-like montage, beach bums welcome a massive UFO invasion as a "surrender to a greater force." In the haunting, metaphysical "See You Later," a man stumbles upon wraithlike figures in a valley, but we soon realize that he may be the wraith, having just died. The one-page, title story deals, among other things, with two lesbians making love in the midst of a cocktail party. When Wilding gets away from dope-smoking writers, filmmakers and other arty types, his stories become more interesting. First serial rights to Harper's.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The best of these short fictions deals with the separation of emotion and sensation. A man discovers a beautiful woman but can't talk to her or touch her. Unable to step into her world or retreat to his own, he dies a slow death in a place somewhere in between, surrounded by people who don't know he's there ("See You Later"). "The Man with Slow Feeling" experiences sensation on a three-hour delay as the result of a near-fatal accident; he chooses suicide over a permanently crippled emotional life. "Aspects of the Dying Process" traces a disastrous love affair with a woman who is all surface. Australian Wilding's spiritual affiliation is with such modernists as David Foster Wallace ( The Girl with Curious Hair , LJ 8/89) and Robert Coover ( Pricksongs and Descants , LJ 9/15/69). His fiction is like jasmine tea, a bit too perfumed for everyday consumption, but bracing as a change of pace. Recommended for literary fiction collections.
- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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