ENDANGERED SPECIES

You have all these odd responsibilities,"" observes Michael, the ex-jockey who wants 40-ish Katherine--poet, mother of girls, now into tycoonery (the logical end of Revolution)--to go back to Hong Kong with him. But Katherine is in transition, about to emerge, in disjointed recollections, from a tent of past secrets: divorced parents who never did truly parent, boarding school and dear Bennington, marriage to a bowling-ball salesman, travel, divorce, writing, activism, another husband (""maliciously normal""), divorce, and affairs all those liblong nights. She wants to write; she wants to make money and puts forth a plan for a Woman's Insurance Company. (She suggests to Jerry Rubin--there are cameo appearances by celebs--a magazine for the impotent called ""CANT."") Nothing has worked, so here is Katherine in love and in bed with Michael, and she will go with him to Hong Kong, as one of a pair of outsiders--an endangered species--loving him, loving kindness. She writes love poems (included here) and lives in the here and now. Then Michael's cancer is diagnosed. In Acapulco there is miracle man Byron, who cures Michael with some mystic mud having to do with Strontium 90. Byron needs to be understood; Michael wishes to be left alone. So Byron may be a ""life's partner. . . for a while."" A snuffling around a life via frenetic prose which crashes and tinkles briefly like restaurant china--intermittently bright, irritatingly diffuse, a splatter of interior agitations.