FICTION

MOTION SICKNESS by Lynne Tillman (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 204 pp.). “One of the privileges of travel is never to fit in,” notes the unnamed narrator of this novel, which can either be read from start to finish, or leafed through, like an album, for the plot is neither sequential nor cumulative. The narrator analyzes her own feelings and expectations and pegs them to book titles and scenes from movies. She writes postcards. She picks up people and bits of their lives as she travels around Europe and the Mediterranean. She even views her own love affairs as escapist fiction. Her various characters intersect with each other, providing a sort of continuity to events. The narrative is full of places, vignettes, and interesting or potentially interesting characters. The narrator listens, but doesn’t ask questions, and she reports sensitively, but doesn’t pretend to understand.