Michael Rips: Pasquale's Nose

By BARBARA HARRIS

Michael Rips has three brothers. After dinner one night, one brother announces to the family that he is moving to the basement and will not be seen again. No screaming, no tantrums, just acceptance. His father builds a special room equipped with electronic signalling so that his son will know when food is being brought down. Rips never saw his brother again.

That story is important because it prepares you to expect the unexpected. And the further you get into this memoir the more blurred are the edges.

The people he meets are so fantastically strange that credulity is indeed stretched.

What readers are told of Rips is tantalising - invisible brother in the basement, adult life lived in hotels (present address that fine old institution, the Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan) and he's a criminal lawyer.

One day his artist wife finds him dragging out the day in a coffee shop and tells him that they and their baby are going to Italy.

Their home for a year will be a small town within commuting distance of Rome. Sutri is an ancient place believed to be Etruscan and its peculiar residents make eccentrics look as grey and boring as civil servants.

Consider this: "He wears knee-high red rubber boots and a soft black fisherman's hat pulled over his eyes. His left arm, wrist to elbow, is heavy with filigreed gold and silver bracelets. In his left hand he holds a riding crop. His right hand is covered by a stiff black glove." The glove allegedly covers a cat's paw instead of a hand. Oh, and he lights his cigarette with a magnifying glass.

Just the sort of person that could have film director David Lynch spitting tacks that Rips got to Sutri before him.

Given such material, Rips produces some fabulous vignettes. If they were fables you'd be struck by the richness and colour of the story-telling. But what makes this more incredible is that Pasquale's Nose is published as a work of non-fiction.

Random House

$54.95