Guided Tours of Hell.

St. Andrews, B.A.

With the publication of the novellas "Three Pigs in Five Days" and "Guided Tours of Hell," Francine Prose skillfully demonstrates how she has managed to nail down a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright award, and a Pushcart Prize. The quality of her writing seems matched by quantity, with several short-story collections and nine novels, including the critically acclaimed Household Saints (1981) and Primitive People (1992).

Prose reworks the archetypal journey into knowledge: "Guided Tours" places Landau, an adjunct playwright/ professor at a third-tier institution, in Prague for a Kafka conference. He must combat demons in the shape of Jiri Krakauer, who embodies the experience, charisma, and university status Landau lacks. Nina of "Three Pigs," assigned by her lover to write a travel article for his journal, experiences Paris as a punishment, as an Elba of exile, until the totally lackluster Leo meets her there.

Ideas resonate in these two novellas, but Prose's characters are not idealized; they are selfish, envious, cowardly, guilt-ridden, limited, real. Prose deftly exposes open wounds and only occasionally seems interested in cauterizing them. Thus, Nina of "Three Pigs" may escape her self-inflicted sufferings by outgrowing Leo, whose most enduring love affair is with himself. But Landau of "Guided Tours" revels in his psychic self-abuse, and his floating anxiety becomes a misanthropy that condemns him.

Dark laughter permeates both works. In "Pigs" Nina wanders Paris with Leo, who admits to having only two interests: sex and death. He has taken the old Freudian programming too seriously and has insufficient intelligence or imagination to escape it. With him, therefore, Nina experiences not the City of Lights but its dim underworld of empty erotica and death chambers: the Catacombs, the cemetery at Montparnasse, the Conciergerie prison cell of Marie Antoinette's last night.

Landau, similarly stunted, staggers through a Nazi death camp outside Prague, unable to connect with any human tragedy larger than his own disappointed ambitions. Many dedicated readers of Prose recognize these characters, with their frailties, fantasies, and romantic illusions about how either love or fame may prove stronger than death.

As always, Prose's meticulous diction and radiographic images reveal her characters' interior lives and exterior settings; to Landau, the death camp outside Prague looks "not unlike the state colleges built after the Vietnam War"; the emotionally adolescent Nina, searching for a man who understands how women like Billie Holiday and, by extension, Nina herself suffer for love, selects not a man who can truly embrace "the abject pure nobility of her languorous self debasement" but the completely shallow and manipulative Leo.

In Paris or in Prague, Prose's characters construct their own emotional catacombs, then remember imperfectly how the walls were built in the first place, or how to break through them in the second. In Guided Tours of Hell the reader's funny bone is hammered into bits. Prose offers only the balm of Nina's apprehension that "the world showed you what you were looking for" and a commensurate, amused awareness of the need to refocus.

B. A. St. Andrews SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse