Visiting a colleague1 of mine recently in the second-hand bookshop2 in Gertrude, Wyo., she had retired to a few years ago, I was puzzled by the pale stain of a thin blue paperback, The Compass of That Sea3, atop one of the many haphazard stacks crowding the feet of her sagging shelves. The author’s name rang a bell whose intervals I could not quite discern. I bent to retrieve it, and, rising, opened to the flyleaf to see that its date of publication was fairly recent. I flipped to the last page. The initial cipher bracketing its time, conjoined with the middle two terms denoting its locus, of gestation, brought a youthful smile to my face. I recognized the fulcral tritone in the bold octave. I showed the well-thumbed book to my colleague, who exclaimed, “Ms. Strickland! I didn’t know she’d written a novel! One of my employees must have priced it.”

The modes of artistic inspiration are as mysterious as they are sacred. You see, the year preceding that indicator of the book’s temporal origin, I had chatted briefly with its author. It warmed me to think that I, somehow, in whatever small way, had been party to its conception.

The season was autumn, and I was in Manahatta for Fashion Week, en route from my péniche in Paris to my pied à terre in Agua Prieta. Ms. Strickland was not yet the author she would prove to be, of course, having but recently eclosed from her collegiate chrysalis;4 I, though prematernally flushed, was still in my runway prime, and, consequently, bien courue. My busy schedule did, however, allow me an evening or two to explore the new-hoisted, all too ephemeral haunts of Port Nab. This was the second such evening, a Thursday before my departure, and we were at a small dockside bistro, a hutch, rough-hewn in the “Texan” style (which was then all the rage), on the backside of the entrance to the Hussein Tunnel. Tyson’s Arroyo, it was called, if I’m not mistaken. Pity it’s gone.

During the flirtatious banter that punctuated the clearing of the remains of our respective plats, I let out that, not only would I soon be breastfeeding, I’d be penning a novel! I had been to Paris, after all! With a curt nod to acknowledge our order of a second bottle of Meursault 1985, Ms. Strickland admitted that, in addition to some nude modeling, she rounded out her days with poetry, but was really, yes really! dreaming of writing short novels that would be the literary rival of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of black irises! And she was just dying to go to Paris! She had heard, you see, that the October sunsets in Paris were —

“Novels? Really now!” I had been on the point of ejaculating, but a wanton butter knife evading the corral of stacked plates on her forearm cut short my delighted riposte, in addition to any subsequent revelations on her part. I do believe her embarrassment at my gravid condition prevented her from continuing further intercourse with us. But she needn’t have been so shy!

Extreme modesty, in fact, had made it very difficult to understand her in the first place.

“Ses phrases étaient sérieusement inaudibles,” remarked my table companion to the east, M. Roubaud, fashionable author whose book on the great fire of London was slated to wow the Goncourt jury come La Rentrée.5

“Parce qu’elle les prononcait extrèmement vite?” queried his camarade du lit, and great inspiration of mine, by the way, La Belle Hortense.

“Et entrecoupés de sortes de ‘hein’ peu distincts,” added M. Methuen, a gifted young heritier dont j’avais eu la chance de l’avoir invité dans mon chaland port Debilly.

“Et placés de maniere telle qu’ils découpaient les propositions principales de façon syntaxiquement hétérodoxe,” continued M. Roubaud.

“Et qu’elle les enchainait aussitot...?” I hastened not to miss my cue.

“Oui, aussitot à d’autres phrases, n’ayant pas de rapport à première vue discernable avec celle qui avait précédé,” definitively closed M. Roubaud with a mot from his future best-seller.6

The head waiter took our dessert order, and the patron himself, a painter by training, uncorked our bottle, which was even better than the first. I had been to Paris, after all! On the way out, I made sure to stop and kiss Ms. Strickland’s red cheeks, and whisper winkingly that a budding author of her bent simply must not miss a chance to see the new Tara T. Dirtytm, Gal V!

I’ve taken the trouble to limn these reflections for this review simply because, after tying the strings on my moderately lighter bourse, and tucking myself bedside with her thin blue book,3 I am delighted to say that, in the interim, and despite undergoing a spell of post-clitical translexicalia manifesting secondary bazokakia, as I’ve been informed by reputable authorities, Ms. Strickland either jettisoned or transformed, but definitely surpassed, her original provincial inspiration, and has given us something much more ambitiously cosmopolitan. My colleague’s minor loss in book stock is your grand gain in book sense!

Rather than O’Keefe, picture, if you will, one of those large color-sample grids by Gerhard Richter. But instead of the squares of paint being arranged randomly, there is a palpable, though far from easily graspable, pattern to their permutation. And what we see is more arabesque than planar, more complexly layered than simply juxtaposed. Lean in close. Each apparent blank in the lattice is not empty; each seemingly smooth tile in the mosaic is not monochrome, nor even abstract, but is a delicate filigree with its own sense and structure, combining with all the others to make a larger sense and structure. Lean in further, close enough to alarm the guards, and it becomes obvious that Ms. Strickland has done epileptic modernism to a turn! and served it with a savory roux au jus, among the piquant flavors of which this author can discern three dominant cutting-edge aromas: quantal fiction in its Roubaudian instar;7 schizomythology as currently formulated by the Institute of Sociophysiology right here in Owlstain!8 and the practice of ludict9 which Ms. Johnson has tailored for us in her delicious Divastigations.10 And, yes, a pungent aftertaste of Gal V! Enjoy!