LINDA

On the kicked-up heels of George's Store (p. 93, J-29) comes Linda, her bare apartment, her teeming, tumescent city--a similarly explosive, iconoclastic cartoon. But with a more direct thrust: her GOOD MORNING's--to mouse and apple, street, car, mattress, boxes, dime; to a man prostrate on the sidewalk, another squatting with sack on a hydrant (""Good morning. Santa""); to ice cream and the friend with whom she shares it--embrace a turnout of the inner city without inflection or assessment. (Curiously, this could be the unsheltered inversion of Goodnight, Moon.) Her persistent ""Good morning"" to the nighttime may puzzle some but it's a happily consistent conclusion: In the tangle of tiny creatures, structures and debris that comprises the setting is a figure reading Growing Up Absurd; like Goodman, Asch is for real.