THE SEDUCTIONS OF NATALIE BACH

Is Natalie Bach--a Jewish-American hippie turned self-styled ""artist""--a lesbian, or does she simply have a few problems to work through with her mother? And is the suspense generated by this question sufficient to entertain a reader through 400 pages of ""tits,"" ""ass"" and clotted, unreadable prose? Natalie is a loudmouthed child of the 1960's, and Luvaas drags her (and us) through every major and minor cultural upheaval of that decade--assassinations, police riots, rebellion, drugs, bohemian ""artists' ""lives in the East Village, flower power in Haight Ashbury, even the Yom Kippur War in Israel--all yawningly familiar, but made new here by the anatomically precise sexual escapades of Natalie and her friends, especially Maxine, Natalie's lesbian sex object. In his descriptions, Luvaas portrays women as either sentimental rabbits or realists preoccupied with body parts. The result is reams of ""poetic"" prose like this:"" We went to the beach and made love on a blanket amid driftwood litter, Marcello dashing about, insanely jealous, nipping at Gene's ass ('Dog smart,' Maxine would say, sensing a serious rival), while laughter rolled in tears down my lover's cheeks, and I lay with pale October sun on my stomach, a gritty breeze slapping my breasts, telling him Marcello was my oracle; I never ignored his advice about men. Sifting sand through my fingers, thinking I had always known this man."" This isn't the worst of it. Natalie is a bathetic Mollie Bloom, and Luvaas only occasionally introduces an apt phrase into this rambling first novel.