Lee & Elaine.

* Ann Rower * Serpent's Tail * $14

Lee & Elaine has its roots in the 1970s flowering of "personal journalism" and all those highly confessional memoirs, or memoirs thinly draped as fiction--but always with the real story being all the crucially important thoughts and emotions of the author-narrator. Think Erica Jong or Kate Millett. The fun in reading those books was watching unfettered narcissism at work. In this one, novelist Ann Rower (Armed Response) works along similar lines, employing one of the most self-absorbed protagonists in modern fiction.

Lee and Elaine are Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, wives of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning but also painters in their own right. Both lived in the Hamptons, and they traveled in the same social and professional circles in the 1940s and 1950s.

The narrator, living in the early 1990s, is a New York writer and art school teacher. She holds the sorts of classes that have an Erotic Aroma unit: "The idea was to bring in something you thought smelled erotic and to write about the journey you took to find it." She lives part-time in the Hamptons and visits the cemetery where Krasner and De Kooning are buried, and she decides to write a book reimagining them as friends and lesbian lovers. Lee & Elaine is the saga of her not writing this book.

First off, she can't really be bothered to do much research--to study the women's paintings or to read Elaine's writing. Instead she has a few conversations with old-timers in the area who remember them and provide an anecdote or two, then she finally goes to a show of their work. These efforts are so sporadic that it takes her a few years to figure out that Krasner and De Kooning seem to have been totally straight and not to have liked each other at all. In fact, there was virtually no connection between them.

Bummer.

But forget about them, what do they matter? What's important is that the narrator is going through her own belated coming-out, leaving behind a 20-year straight relationship for a female student, Iris, who works on her "suicide project" at the narrator's house: "She was going to do the Virginia Woolf bit--walk into the water, but unlike Virginia, naked."

Iris turns out to be as tragic erotically as artistically. She warms the massage oil to boiling and ties up the narrator while she's still dressed so she has to be untied to get her leopard-print jumpsuit off. The narrator worries about looking old and fat. (I think she should have worried about trying to appear sexy in a leopard-print jumpsuit.) No one seems to have much fun in bed, and the whole lackluster mess falls apart.

Then there's another lesbian affair and all her problems getting out of the 20-year relationship with the guy and (maybe worse) losing her SoHo loft in the process. On top of this, she develops a stomach ailment and can no longer eat many foods (she lists them). Meanwhile, the book project is going all to hell. The poor woman just can't get a break. "I feel like I missed out on all the great funerals, Frank's, Jackson's, Lee's, Elaine's.... My only chance left is Willem de Kooning. But it seems like he'll never die." And then, when he finally does, no one calls to let her know (I wonder why), and she misses that one too.

There is something hugely irritating but nonetheless riveting about the childlike way this character views life--all of it--as something that's essentially about her. Perhaps many people feel this way; they're just too embarrassed to admit it, except perhaps to their journals. Reading Lee & Elaine offers precisely something of this guilty pleasure, like picking up a stranger's diary off a bus seat.

Anshaw is author of Aquamarine and the forthcoming Lucky in the Corner.