THE FLORENTINE PAPERS

Palmer's first novel-about a narrator's obsession with a beautiful woman who writes about spinach-is a lushly written narrative that brings to mind a Julian Barnes or Anthony Burgess rather than any American. The narrator is a struggling ``chunky, paranoid, poltroonish poet'' who ekes out a living selling paper cups of shrimp and crab to tourists in San Francisco before happening upon his true vocation: to love and serve as ``tester and taster and muse'' to Maria Perpetua (``born Maria Pengulling''), who is ``a demiurge, an oracle'' devoted-after a childhood consisting of equal portions of squalor and ``pink, puffy nonsense''-to writing The Gastronomic Hejira. In short, Maria is a quirky gourmet with a flair for prose. Once she reaches S.F., she takes on a female lover and feeds her into plumpness, whereupon she meets the male narrator, who quickly begins an ``inscrutable courtship'' (``By cooking, Maria was making love to me''). While the narrator helps with her manuscript, which focuses finally on spinach (spinacea oleracea), we treated to (or forced to bear, depending on your attitude) various lyrical descriptions of spinach dishes. Our narrator then undergoes a dark night of the soul, after which Maria finds a publisher and succeeds with her offbeat book beyond anyone's expectations. Meanwhile, the narrator, who has lost her, comes to write The Florentine Papers as ``a personal cleansing,'' and the story, surprisingly enough, even manages to descend into underclass pathos (via a subplot) while maintaining its cholesterol-laden style, finally ending with a whimper instead of a bang. His prose can be rich to the point of flatulence, but, still, Palmer's devised an original magical mystery tour that stakes out its own peculiar portion of the comic universe.