Stargell, the 29-year-old narrator of Craig Nova's Incandescence, is a man of intelligence. Perhaps even genius. He once worked as an inventor at one of those high-powered think tanks but was fired after spending half a million dollars on a project to extract oil from the wing joints of moths….

So when the story opens, we find Stargell a down-and-out taxi hack in New York. He's broke. He's on the skids. He lives—survives—in a dingy three-room apartment…. A long, dizzying fall from the think-tank heights. And, in the course of this novel, a sad predicament gets even sadder. Partly in horror, partly in puzzlement, we watch as Stargell makes some zany but essentially halfhearted efforts to pull himself out of this mess. Alas, he only manages to descend deeper into darkness.

What are we to make of this inventor, one who seemingly can't invent solutions to the most ordinary of human problems?

We look for clues. On the second page of Incandescence, a single sentence stands alone amid two inches of white space: "My name is Stargell." We never learn his first name. Clearly, then, the name Stargell must be important. Why else would the author maroon that sentence as he does, inviting the reader to ponder meanings? Why, as if to buttress the point, would the author call the company for which Stargell works the Star Garage? Stargell: star, light, brilliance, Day-Glo, incandescence. The associations are plentiful, and Nova uses all of them. Indeed, either by coincidence or design, this star business inevitably leads us to the word "nova" and from there to the author's own surname, Nova. Question is, how does all this hook up with the story? It isn't enough, after all, to display constellations of associated images and metaphors. The function of imagery and metaphor is to expand and, so to speak, illumine the dramatic events of a story, heightening but not imposing meaning on those events. The feeling, after reading this novel, is that the plot—the tracing of a falling star—hasn't the strength to support the heavy imagery, or the even heavier metaphor. In the end, the general outweighs the particular.

There is, however, much to admire in this, Nova's third novel. The writing is brisk and often funny. Stargell's hip cynicism, though grating after a time, produces some very witty lines. And why not? His, after all, is an incandescent wit. Studded throughout the book, in counterpoint to the comic aspects, there are several entirely uncomic and even tragic scenes that convey the terrors that can befall a man who can neither understand nor escape his own disintegration.

The plot of Incandescence is difficult to summarize. Events are linked by the flimsiest and most coincidental of circumstances; characters pop in for brief appearances and then disappear entirely. Incandescence: the quick, bright flicker of people and places. Incandescence: the random burning of flames, or stars, in the black world of urban New York City. (p. 53)

Stargell auditions for a job as a gorilla at an amusement park. The scene has funny moments and a semitragic outcome, but it runs much too long and makes us wonder what the point is. Black humor for its own sake can become boring…. The characters begin to seem like links on a chain, identical in their tough-guy fatalism, their world-weary lingo, their antic behavior. This sense of repetition also infects the events of the novel, which become variations on the same slapstick joke.

One interpretation for all this might be that Craig Nova wanted to take us on a tour through the concentric circles of hell, New York-style. But concentric circles imply a tightening of the screw, an increasing of tension, a multiplication of horror. In Incandescence each ring seems identical to the last. There is in the book no sense of change.

Beyond this, though, Stargell's peculiar ambivalence to his plight is never resolved. He accepts, with a few cynical asides, the terrible things that happen to him, and we never find out why. Why, in fact, doesn't he bite the bullet and find himself a decent job and start cleaning up his act? Despite all the "falling star" stuff, human beings are not stars. Human beings—Stargell especially—have brains, and human beings have the potential for reform and understanding and adaptation. The reader can't help wondering why Stargell doesn't start exercising some willpower. We want to know more about what makes Stargell behave as he does. We want, and never really get, psychological insight. What we get instead is a metaphor, and it isn't sufficient. (p. 54)