Bye-bye

by Jane Reavill Ransom

Bye-Bye lures us into the mind of a sexually adventurous New Yorker in her mid-30s haunted by memories of her mother and of her own failed marriage. Her too-perfect husband threw her out three years before the novel opens, because of her infidelities. Partly in an effort to wrench herself out of depression, she "disappears" by changing her appearance and assuming a false identity as Rose Anne Waldin, or Rosie. Rosie boasts three lovers: two women - one an S&M pornographer, the other an aloof "Personal Ad" - and one man, whom she meets at a book-burning. The books being burned are by a celebrated Chicano poet who (an angry public has discovered) was apparently never Chicano at all. The scandal involves an elusive performance artist known only as the "Andorgenie," whose identity-bending perversities mirror Rosie's. We gradually learn about Rosie's not-at-all-rosy past, of her compulsive, often darkly comic behavior, and of her obsession with murder. Soon it grows apparent that Rosie is p