SPRINGER'S PROGRESS

The minifinneganswake of vodka-sozzled Greenwich Village prose-lush Lucien (""Loosh"") Springer--a prince of writer's block (""I'm experimenting in a new genre. Empty pages"") and equipped with an angelic doormat-wife who blesses and supports him, even when he's abroad with a broad. The current broad is budding young novelist Jessica Cornford, provider of healing adulation and coitus noninterruptus. (Forgive him! Hasn't his old flame, a famed poetess, just pilled out to the big time? Just after giving him a lemony snows-of-yesteryear crotch farewell?) Yes, Jessica has Loosh gasping like Humbert Humbert, but let the punhappy fellow tell it himself: ""Sorcery thereafter, headlong into lubricious delirium she'll spirit him. Malleus Maleficarum. Casuistical scoundrel named Urbain Grandier Springer's become, all the demoniac nuns of Loudun he's copulating with at once. . . ."" As you'll have guessed, our splatteringly allusive hero has apparently read everything worth reading (""I'm nine years older than Leopold Bloom. . . I've even got hemorrhoids""). Loosh's own readership is. . . well, a cult of perhaps eleven or twelve happy few. The cult for over-writing like David Markson's may be somewhat larger.