FIND HIM!

So great are the handicaps Elaine Kraf sets out for herself in this obsessional and obtuse novel that you might want, despite everything, to cheer her over. Everything includes a semi-catatonic narrator who's living a ""shallow filmy eggshell existence"" with a huge-eared, unwashed, history-scribbling lug named Oliver who has toilet-trained her, slept with her, taught her French, and in his spare time constructed a mechanical duplicate of someone named Edith who deserted him at some point in the past. Everything also means coming to terms with dialogue that either consists of one-word commands like ""Eat"" and ""Wash"" and ""Chew"" or miscellaneous moans: ""OOOOaaah"" or ""Geeeh."" And it involves generously granting the possibility that Kraf is writing an allegory of normal love: ""the year of the plaid skirt, the year of the violet dress, and the year of Oliver's crisis."" But fair's fair--and for each dispensation a reader allows, the reward comes up mingy and without thanks; Kraf, stuffing her book with snatches of her own musical compositions, drone poetry, drawings of giraffes, Works out of a momentum so private it seems almost impolite to enter--and as soon as it becomes clear that Find Him! is more a dare than plea, the wish to cheer for this underdog book disappears.