ONE OF EACH

By John Skow

Collectors are crazy, a little or a lot--gently mad or glittery-eyed gaga. Nuttiness is the only sane explanation for wanting to possess every matchbook cover or baseball card ever printed or for paying $47 million to own a Van Gogh. Or trying to collect every fact in the space-time continuum by memorizing an encyclopedia or deciding to experience one of every kind of lover.

Thus collectors must be interesting, no? No, it turns out, in Geoff Nicholson's cheerfully loopy comic novel Hunters & Gatherers (Overlook; 215 pages). Nicholson's hero, a feckless would-be writer named Steve Geddes, has unwisely taken a publisher's advance to produce a book on collectors. But the collector collector finds that his subjects, though daft, are stunningly boring. An obsessed gatherer of sounds has recorded utter silence in Namibia, the Sahara and the Australian outback. One human rodent, who promises to show Geddes the world's largest beer-can collection, leads him to a completely empty room. Curses, he says, my hostile wife and son have stolen every can and taken them to the dump. But no; later the wife and son force the loony to admit that he never collected any cans whatsoever, in fear that any such exhibit would fall short of perfection.

Quite understandably, Geddes is becalmed with writer's block. Becalmed with impotence too, though the beautiful Victoria, a collector of lovers, works tirelessly to cure him. Nicholson's tale is not so much a novel as a collection of loosely related fiction riffs, but it does not suffer at all from its lack of connective tissue. His imaginings are always peculiar, frequently droll, and on several occasions funny, about car freaks, salesmen, book critics, sex and the alarming sort who acquire the complete works of novelists. Worth collecting; first editions available.