Adult Comedy Action Drama.

Richard Prince's imagery has always exuded a kind of Butt-head cool - a masturbating-in-the-tree-fort, Cher's-latest-tattoo, Playboy-swiped-from-Dad naughtiness, made all the better by swigging a mickey of convenience-store Scotch. But then, for a second, let's pretend we're not up in the tree fort with our pants down. Let's pretend we're aliens in outer space, and are using a copy of Prince's Adult Comedy Action Drama as a travel guide for an upcoming Earth visit. What do we make of life in this America, this strange land of soiled mattresses, '70s Dodge Challengers, palm skirts, casual sex, and fried-chicken boxes, of fridges filled with beer, diet mixers, and cheap white wine,of badly executed bondage and of Playboy bunny heads fused with skulls? From Prince's Big-page book of two-page color photo spreads, we, as aliens, would deduce (and probably not incorrectly) that a large deep portion of the human experience is spent engaged in reproduction and day-dreams of reproduction, in murder and dreams of murder - with a goodly amount of remainder time devoted to seeking extreme stimulation of one sort or another.

To the alien eye, Prince's artwork - paintings and sculpture - would seem unself-consciously complicit in this vision of U.S. culture. But to the U.S. eye, Prince's work is that culture's strong reflector, the lens through which the American scene comes into focus. The U.S. eye that has followed Prince's work over the years would also see a painterly revolution occurring and might be surprised that his drawing now has a beauty and distinction not unlike that of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg Adult Comedy Action Drama is a gorgeous book, lushly produced, with clever use of lithomphic process colors. Its images - subjectively sequenced, and lurching toward a hermetically cohesive classification system, but shorn of essay-peaks entirely for itself, articulating and classifying a sexual sublanguage that has percolated and mutated inside U.S. culture for decades. The book also shows Prince's work maturing into a voluptuous, intelligent dimension that you might not have imagined, given it roots. Be advised, however, alien or not. if you have teenagers around the house, don't expect the book to stay on the coffee table for long.

Douglas Coupland is the author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life, God. and must recently