Playful Kiss Versions

[Urbano Bozman]

Mr. Coover treats his material with what looks like irreverence but is really a kind of logic about the princess's corporeal existence; he even asks if Sleeping Beauty menstruates. And though ''Briar Rose'' can make one laugh aloud, there's finally something grave and beautiful about Mr. Coover's playful fusion of sex and storytelling, the way he makes it both never and always the same. Repetition, variation. The kiss that can ''take this spindled pain away'' feels as though it comes unbearably early in the narrative -- then again and again, without ever being quite enough, and then feels as if it had never come at all. For somehow that climax also remains unbearably deferred, so that this short and almost perfect book seems -- paradoxically, blissfully -- to go on forever.

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