FICTION

PUSSY, KING OF THE PIRATES by Kathy Acker (Grove Press: $21; 277 pp.). It’s true, as the jacket copy says, that in this novel cult writer Kathy Acker is “ransacking world history, literature and language itself.” But to what end? It’s a promising idea (“Cutthroat Island” aside): A band of wrathful, oversexed women becoming pirates to make their mark during a world-wide grrrrl-romp and, just possibly, find some purloined treasure. To read the novel, though, is to be constantly reminded that Acker’s self-consciously postmodern soup would be much more effective in other media--as a video game, a graphic novel or cartoon, a multimedia CD (in fact Acker has, with the punk band the Mekons, cut an “aural companion” to the novel). Acker invokes many literary touchstones--Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, “The Story of O,” the writing techniques of Joyce and Burroughs--but you find yourself thinking that this pushing of the novelistic envelope has been done better, and more originally, by others.