THE WAY IN

The assumption of fiction that it tells a story is to a great degree overlooked here in what is self-evidently an autobiographical memoir in which Eugene Mirabelli passes as Frank Annunzio. Frank's itinerant narrative is sketchily stapled together in a series of fast takes and even quicker dissolves and time does not lend its usual orderly continuity: Frank's life is seen in inconsecutive jump shifts--a Boston childhood via Italo-American parents; later years in and around Cambridge; teaching for a time; working for a research firm at another juncture; painting throughout (sometimes pornography); and pursuing a dragonfly existence with any number of obliging girls until finally his life takes on a certain direction and definition with the basics of marriage and paternity. . . . Where Mr. Mirabelli does succeed is in retaining a certain quality of youthful, casual experience as it is or as it was: where he fails, however, is to make it seem more than inconclusive and inconsequential.