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Dra­
Stacey Levine. Sun & Moon Press, 1997. 150pp. $12.95

Kathleen Canavan

In this, her first novel, award-winning short story writer Stacey Levine tells the sometimes comic and oftentimes unsettling tale of a nondescript woman, Dra-, searching for a nondescript job in a nondescript world. Fanatically obsessed with achieving a state of gainful employment, any employment, Levine's title character maneuvers through a surreal landscape of seemingly endless corridors, pneumatic tubes and basements upon basements trying to report to her much-desired worksite. But, alas, our poor feckless heroine never quite makes it there, finding herself continually sidetracked by unrelenting bouts of crying and narcolepsy, her own hypochondria and a slew of quirky characters doling out twisted psychoanalysis.

While the book on the whole serves as an interesting commentary on the ultimately maddening pursuit of jobs and careers that plays such a defining role in our culture today, Levine's invocation of Kafka is too often trite and uncompelling. The author does manage to create an adequately disturbing world of dreariness muted by a hazy film of grey that would cast even the most stalwart optimist into an inescapable pit of bloom and insanity. But, unfortunately, it's a place we've seen before. And when pitted against a real life world replete with images of preteen snipers, crack babies and cannibalistic serial killers, Levine's world seems hardly necessary to remind us that something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong.