BOOK REVIEW / Lolita wasn't even trying: 'Nude Men' - Amanda Filipacchi: Heinemann, 9.99 pounds

THE READER may approach a 'comedy' about child sexuality with understandable wariness - or with tongue at the ready in tutting position. But no qualm or highmindedness can last for long in Nude Men. It is remarkable how this skilled Franco-American writer (she moved from France to the US at the age of 17 and is now 25) succeeds in quelling prurience before it gets a grip. This is partly because of her frisky but finely tuned sense of the absurd and partly because her narrator is so wobbly and vulnerable there is scarcely any predatory male behaviour in him at which to tut.

Jeremy Acidophilus, 29, factfinder and dogsbody at Screen magazine, is innocently eating jelly at a humdrum Manhattan cafe when a ravishing woman approaches and asks him to pose nude for a painting. He is not beautiful enough for her regular Playgirl centrespread spot, but he'll do for art. Jeremy dithers and preens. Crippling press- ups and discussions with the cat (who obligingly talks back throughout the novel) cannot fully prepare him for the unusual sittings ahead.

While Jeremy tries to impress Lady Henrietta (nicknamed after Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book which is her Bible), he himself is being artfully, erotically and mercilessly stalked by her Ladyship's daughter Sara, an 11- year-old who makes Lolita look like she wasn't even trying. Flawless of body and licentious of mind, Sara hurls herself at Jeremy, and when scruples finally break down at Disneyworld it does seem more like adult abuse than child abuse. (At least it can be made to seem so on the page: whether this would degenerate on the screen is another matter.) In any case, to succumb is wrong, as Jeremy well knows. And lest he forget, his mother, who has been informed by a poisonous ex-girlfriend, hires actors to bump into him on the street and in supermarkets, 'accidentally', and to make apparently random references to the

molestation of 11-year-old girls in their conversation. His mother has squads of these 'strangers' in her employ and her dogged, if unsubtle, trickery is thematic.

Magic and illusion are vital to the novel. Jeremy has never outgrown a childish yearning to control destiny with magic charms. As seductress and girl/woman, Sara is both spellbinder and illusionist. Lady Henrietta's painting, in subject matter and technique, draws upon optical illusion and delusion reminiscent of Dorian Gray.

Amanda Filipacchi pulls off hat trick after hat trick, not only standing moral precepts on their heads, but flinging the plot forward, navigating twists of death, disease and a fatal accident actually caused by male nudity. She populates her circus with a bearded ingenue, a parrot who recites Kubler Ross, a clutch of nude men and an 'abstract' dancing magician whose amateurish prestidigitation becomes so chic that New Yorkers are afraid not to applaud her wherever she goes lest they lose their social credibility. The impact at every turn is unexpected, blackly comic, frequently poignant and bracingly original.