Lost in the Stacks

PAIRING OFF by Julian Moynahan. 252 pages. William Morrow. $5.95.

Julian Moynahan is one of those novelists who are cursed with a shorter attention span than their readers. His style is to restlessly gad about--from character to character, from scene to scene --always in the name of art, of course. Between the lines one can almost hear him learnedly murmuring the standard excuse: "Just reflecting the fragmentation of contemporary experience . . ."

Stuff and nonsense, or sheer blarney. For Moynahan, though he is currently disguised as an English professor at Rutgers, is really one of those nonstop Irish-American storytellers, the kind that hold Boston barrooms at bay with: "Wait! Wait, boys! And then there's the one about . . ."

What Moynahan pretends to be writing this time is still another crisis-of-identity novel. His purported antihero, Myles McCormick, floats adrift and lost in the rare-books stacks of the Boston Free Library. (Moynahan once worked at the Boston Public Library.)

Myles is one of those feckless mid-thirties adolescents whom employers classify as "Out of circulation" and women stamp "Overdue." Naturally, Moynahan can no more keep his attention on salvaging poor Myles than Myles can himself. Forever slipping away into puns and put-ons, the antic professor becomes cheerfully obsessed by the minor oddballs he invents.

And why not? What reader will have eyes for mild, muddled Myles when confronted with a clutch of scene stealers like these? Lou Doxiades: an amateur philosopher with the soul of a benign procurer who imports waiters from Athens for Boston restaurants. And Dr. Petkov: a Bulgarian scholar who has spent his life preparing, but not writing, a biography of Chester A. Arthur.

Between these literary vaudeville acts, Moynahan vamps with stand-up monologues on the purpose of libraries and the function of the city planner. Or he stages set-piece black situation-comedy scenes, like Myles' forlorn pastoral picnic on the shores of Walden Pond, now carpeted with beer cans.

Sure, and when Moynahan ends a story, he ends it. But it's a pity he has to go through the formal motions of writing a novel at all. At its free-form best, Pairing Off is an Irish happening -- as luckily disorganized as a good St. Patrick's Day parade.

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