THE GIRL IN THE WHITE COAT ON THE DELTA EAGLE

Bud Hanks is a cordwood cutter, sporadic poet, and once-upon-a-time Bapist preacher. Now he's bunking in an unused squash court behind his ex-father-in-law's Long Island estate and seeing a female psychotherapist, Dr. Anna Kochbaum. Dr. Kochbaum (""Anna"" when she's less staid and away from the office--a whole other persona) urges him to track down the reality of a deep childhood memory: seeing a girl in a white coat pass by his parents' car in a train during World War II. Hanks, a rambler and a shambler, isn't so anxious to tighten up his private myth and send it public, but he gives it a shot: an ad in the Personals column of some Southern newspapers which brings an answer--a black transsexual claiming to be the girl Hanks saw. . . . But it's here that Youree's prose gets excessive and sloppy, and so do the farfetched happenings--for example, a treehouse shoot-out that involves a guilty malefactor who years ago molested the girl on the train, Hanks' ex-wife, a virgin nymphet, and Dr. Kochbaum, all of them brought together without purpose or sense. Energetic, some sporadic promise--but, overall, an overheated mess.