Entitled Work

Laid up by a lumbar injury, his partner Julie River sculpting in an adjacent room, novelist Alf Gillespie waits for news from an agent concerning "A Spiral Mandala." He never expected an enforced convalescence, nor does he anticipate certain success, so makes use of the extension of time by audiotaping ideas and experience in structured form. The language that issues is exotic and offbeat: its' subjects include a caustic view of the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century, at least one love story, a writers' rite of passage and the making of a mythic sculpture. In crafting a narrative by way of his adult life Alf produces a text at once poetic and prosaically pedantic.