[close] The author is cynical and vain; the book is autobiographical. The story of a misogynist with Amiri Baraka for a roommate who drinks and fights his way out of the life of the woman downstairs. The narrative ignores the rules of reality and supplants them with the rules of fiction, twisting according to memory more than time. Baraka acts as conduit for the supernatural and for wisdom into the cold, rash, alcoholic life of the narrator and protagonist, Abel. [close]