What's missing in the family encyclopedia

"This encyclopedia is a dream," author Alistair McCartney declares right at the start of what he formally bills a novel. And in a sense this giddy literary jape is all three. Its form is that of an eccentric encyclopedia, with entries including "Head Lice," "Hummel Figurines," "Sex Addiction in Antiquity" and "Plane Crashes, the History of." Its content is quasi-fictional with elements (there's no real plot or characters to speak of) that sport a woozy dream-like logic to their assemblage. And this in turn relates to McCartney's coolly casual observations about sex which "is, after all, just a variation on dream." As for the title, "The End of the World Book," it's less apocalyptic than you might think. For McCartney's point of departure is the World Book Encyclopedia. "The End of the World Book" is its addenda; filled with entries that the most hallowed of suburban middle-class family encyclopedias somehow left out.

"The first encyclopedia was created by Aristotle in 322 BC; it was an attempt to bring together all the ideas of the time, but he also made things up," McCartney notes. But those tomes we know today have no particular author -- culling their information from a wide variety of sources that are then alphabetically organized. "The End of the World Book" just has McCartney -- singular and specific a writer as all get-out.

Born in Australia, he has for the last 14 years been what polite society refers to as the "life-partner" of noted Los Angeles performance artist Tim Miller. McCartney regards the term with icy disdain: "I'll refer to my boyfriend as my insurgent." The literary "insurgency" that "The End of the World Book" proceeds from is almost entirely French -- the not-quite-novels of Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, Raymond Queneau and Louis-Rene des Forets invariably called recits (accounts).

One thinks especially of "Exercises in Style," a 1947 compendium by Queneau in which a bus ride is recounted 99 different ways. There is however, one notable English-language precedent for McCartney -- the writings of artist/aphorist Joe Brainard whose "I Remember" series mixed nostalgia with puckish wit in haiku-like recollections such as "I remember 'come as you are' parties. Everyone cheated," and "I remember when I worked in a snack bar and how much I hated people who ordered malts."