di Richard Eder
Data di pubblicazione: 28/07/2002

Alessandro Baricco shines as a miniaturist. Into the 91 pages of his first novel, ''Silk,'' he packed a quicksilver allegory about life as a quest -- in this case the voyages of a French silkworm trader to 19th-century Japan -- and seasoned it with the particular traits of an effervescent and haunting portrait. The book is short but large.
In ''Ocean Sea'' there is a collection of miniatures; they dazzle but find themselves struggling and colliding upon a canvas considerably too expansive for them. It is long but not as large.

''City,'' Baricco's new novel, attempts to link scattery stories and sorties, some quite fine, into a loose postmodern epic. It's like feeding growth hormone to a bonsai tree: a native gracefulness can be perceived but the distention distorts it.
One of the two leading characters in ''City'' is Gould, a 13-year-old prodigy with a brain under forced cultivation by his professors, who are looking for a Nobel Prize. His development in every other respect is lacking. With his father away on secret government missions and his mother in a mental institution, he lives alone. He wets his bed, reserving the bathroom for devising an elaborate radio serial about a boxer -- perhaps one he would like to be. His only friends are imaginary: Diesel, a giant, and Poomerang, a mute.
Until, that is, he meets the book's other unconventional character, a woman in her 30's named Shatzy Shell. Both embody the Spanish maxim: if they give you lined paper, write the other way. All too soon, as the eccentric thickens into the deliberate, the other way becomes the rule.

The two meet not so much cute as wryly phantasmagoric. Shatzy is insecurely employed as a telephone pollster for a commercial research group. Instead of getting her questions answered in the required 30 seconds, she falls into intimate half-hour conversations with the people she calls. When Gould calls, for reasons too curly to elaborate, a zany exchange follows. At the end of it she is fired, and Gould has invited her to dine with him and his two imaginary friends.
Shatzy has her own oddities. She keeps framed photographs of Eva Braun and Walt Disney and, since the age of 6, has been inventing ''westerns'': vignettes she recites into a portable tape recorder. Nevertheless, she is a serious person and a rescuer. By the end of the book she will have rescued Gould from his professorially decreed fate as a genius. Meanwhile she's shocked to see that he has been left with no one to care for him.

He explains. Gould had assured his father that he'd hired a governess named Lucy. Offering to let the senior Gould speak to this imaginary person by phone, he put Poomerang on instead. ''But isn't Poomerang a mute?'' Shatzy asks. ''Right. Lucy's a mute too.'' This worked, Gould says. ''Poomerang is terrific. You know, it's not the same listening to an ordinary person be silent and listening to a mute be silent. It's a different silence.''
So far so good; rather wonderful, in fact. From here on, though, Baricco's hydra-headed venture tends to be all heads and little useful body. Shatzy takes the imaginary Lucy's place as governess, and from time to time, with her mixture of quirkiness and devotion, she nudges Gould away from the glory planned for him, and into a humbler but more authentic future. (Authenticity includes keeping Diesel and Poomerang and devoting ever more bathroom time to his wishful boxing serial.)

The Gould-Shatzy relationship gradually recedes, though. Most of the book is taken up by their separate riffs, told in a roiling consciousness stream of wit, whimsy and mist. There are considerable stretches dedicated to Gould's invented boxer, a rich kid who perseveres in persuading a trainer to take him on. He wins all his fights by dint of balletic evasion until the day he comes up against a genuine pile-driving puncher. Baricco does boxing extremely well, and his round-by-round accounts are graceful and convincing. For a while they serve to float the secret longings of his fragile prodigy, but eventually they take on a capsizing weight of their own.
So do Shatzy's mini-westerns. Some are very good; for instance, the story of a woman sharpshooter who can blast the jack of hearts out of a full pack thrown in the air. A challenger tosses the cards and she shoots him through the heart. He had, of course, concealed the jack in his breast pocket. (My pleasure is haunted by a possibly delusional suspicion that this has been told somewhere before.)

There is a creepy gem about a sheriff who day after day follows an Indian, accused of raping and murdering a child, across the desert; never losing sight of him but never able to get closer than a few dozen yards. Eventually the sheriff turns back and it is the Indian who follows; the pursued now the pursuer, the fugitive from justice now, startlingly, its agent. Other pieces display a kind of candied portentousness, among them an interminably and facetiously symbolic tale about a town where all the clocks have stopped because of a horrendous crime.

In one sequence, Gould, Shatzy and the imaginary friends go to a fast-food restaurant. Shatzy's efforts to order a plain hamburger are frustrated by all the featured specials offered with it (among them a lottery for 500 bacon cheeseburgers). The joke goes back at least to Jack Nicholson's attempt to order plain toast in ''Five Easy Pieces.''
A couple of the riffs are delivered by a professor with the archly suspect name of Mondrian Kilroy. He discusses curves as ''the flight path by means of which the real escaped the rigid framework of its destiny.'' He goes on to consider Monet's waterlilies, which show, he maintains, ''the rotundity of nothingness.'' They ''appear to be floating in a space without hierarchies, in which closeness and distance do not exist, nor up and down, nor before and after''; and they represent ''not waterlilies but the gaze that gazes at them.''

Such disquisiting may widely annoy, though I rather like it. Certainly there is quite a lot in the book that, in Ann Goldstein's clean translation, has a playful charm. What it lacks is much connection beyond the author's willing of a connection. In a book of over 300 pages this is a handicap. ''City'' skips rope without a rope.

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