PHOENIX

This debut novel by a two-time Flannery O'Connor Award-winner (Spirit Seizures, 1987) is really a picaresque novella, the occasional chronicle of a young woman's life on the road during the heyday of hippiedom. Ergo, its fabric is composed of scenes from a neo-Edenic California (Big Sur, Venice Beach, etc.), tarot cards, Grotowski, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, brown rice and sprouts, birth-control pills, bell-bottomed blue jeans, mescaline, acid, and peyote. In its foreground is Phoenix, skinny from a diet that wouldn't keep a sloth alive, alternately drug-wired and morosely introspective (reciting Rimbaud, of course), having ``dleiberately drifted out of the calm flat stream of college privilege.'' Her itinerancy yields adventures: a relationship with an actor named Deal, who straps her during sex and convinces her to play the dead girl in Genet's Deathwatch; rape while hitching; a stint as a waitress at an Isla Vista coffeehouse; a bad trip in the woods; and finally a reunion with her distressed mom and dad (a psychologist and kindergarten teacher, respectively), with whom she eventually heads for home. Pritchard's approach—using the present tense, weaving in and out of the first- and third-person, eschewing quotation marks in dialogue, and including snatches of Phoenix's travel diary—gives a patina of authenticity, and Phoenix's prefeminist revolution mind-set is interesting (not to mention depressing). But for most serious students of the Sixties, Kerouac is best, sharper, still the real thing.