WILD GROW THE LILIES

Luke Sheridan, a capering Dublin newshound, loves grog, the sluts at Madame Lala's whorehouse, and endless jars of warm bitter rhetoric. His capacity for fantastification of the ordinary and overflowing acerbities make Wilde a mere pimple on the Irish tongue. ""I must admit the verbosity of my own exuberance overwhelms me at times,"" he says, later adding, ""Hyperbole is out national pastime."" For Luke is a novelist creating ""a chronicle of Dublin writ large and writ loud. . . ."" Subtitled ""An Antic Novel,"" Lilies is as much about its own lashings of language as anything else, for the midsummer-day's plot is only a fugitive cloud over the sun. Luke is sent out to Howth by his roaring editor Mulligan to investigate the attempted poisoning of Kathy Furlong Fustenhalter who has written a best-seller (""All panting tits and a fuck on every page. Being made into a film of course. . ."") by her crippled Teutonic husband Otto whose erections during yoga headstands are much to be admired. And that is the level of invention throughout, bawdy chases through the family manor, much ado about gin, randy billygoats copulating in foam. ""Oh, such a night this is,"" cries whoremistress Lala, ""such a happy night!"" High jinks that can only be relished three sheets to the wind.