By Brian Pera

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM HAS been writing deliriously expansive, virtually unclassifiable cultural criticism for years now, so it makes a certain kind of sense that his first novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, should cast such a wide net, drawing in classical music, cinema, Italian circus art, and Joseph Cornell, among other things. The novel is presented as one in a series of 25 sprawling notebooks ranging on subjects from illness to sex to celebrity. Pianist Theo Mangrove, their author – or curator – is just as all over the place. He lives quietly in East Kill, N.Y., a "tiny, insignificant, never-discussed town" surrounded by waterways, with his sister, his wife, and his mother, a more celebrated musician than he'll ever be. A breakdown has stalled Theo's career, but the notebooks plot a glorious comeback: a reunion concert with Moira Orfei, Italy's premiere (if pickled) star of the circus.

Theo is a gay man with a straight man's mind-set, or vice versa – or not. His doctor calls him bisexual. Polysexual is more like it. His twin vocations, he says, are nudity and music. He has 20 erections a day, only two of which his wife relieves. Hustlers take care of the rest. His favorite hustler resembles an extra in a Pasolini film; another, a shopworn Alain Delon. His wife might be Mitzi Gaynor. His aunt, a frequent sex partner, is a Marlene Dietrich look-alike.

Like the glass-covered shadow boxes of Cornell, an eccentric with whom he has a lot in common, Theo assembles deeply personal fantasy figures into the stanza-like compartments of his imagination, relating them to one another poetically. "I have a melancholy relation to words," he writes. "They fall away the moment I try to use them." Ostensibly a collection of impressions, memories, and spectral visitations around which the ineffable might eventually resolve itself, his scattered observations and ever elaborate plans celebrate, more covertly, the irreconcilable: "the evasion of exactitude, for the pleasure of escaping it."

Koestenbaum wrote about Cornell in The Queen's Throat, an extended study of opera divas by a self-professed opera queen. The Queen's Throat was a highly personal valentine, a devotee paying homage with selections from his cherished treasure trove of memorabilia and marginalia. Cornell too was an enraptured aficionado, living, like Theo, a somewhat constricted existence with an unusually overbearing mother. He expressed his secret self through collecting – librettos, record albums, books, prints, theater memorabilia, souvenir photos, ticket stubs – filing it all away in the meticulously categorized archives of his basement workshop. Koestenbaum understands this sort of starstruck itemization firsthand. Jackie under My Skin, his 1996 gaze at Jackie O, was organized around a list: Jackie's death, Jackie's hairdos, Jackie's wealth, etc. His essays are equal parts scholarship and projection. The fan's experience, he has remarked, "is not a pale simulacrum of the diva's, but its necessary mirror." For him, as for Cornell, looking at the object of one's fantasy means a journey deeper into and away from oneself, ecstatic acts of identification and impersonation.

By any conventional standard, self-reflection in Moira Orfei is a splintered, inconclusive proposition, and it remains unclear what the reality of Theo's story is. Theo, like Cornell, ignores what Koestenbaum refers to as "the adamantly legislated difference between reality and imagination." The happy event of his reunion concert, however exhaustively foreseen, might never happen. He might never have met Orfei in the first place. Did Cornell really see, in the guise of a uniformed guard closing a window opposite his own, the figure of his beloved ballerina, Fanny Cerrito? The notebooks transform the everyday reality of Theo's life by blocking it out, and yet they are the clearest indication of who he is, his obsessive identification the poetic core of his person.

If Koestenbaum weighs heavily on one polar end of the hunter-gatherer continuum, embodying the collector's enthusiasm for profusion, then Derek McCormack exists at the other, drawing from the mass to produce economic, curiously elliptic displays of symmetry. Koestenbaum represents what he calls the gay virtuoso gabber, "that creature of lists, parentheses, digressions, apostrophes, opinions, and contradictions" whose voice is a free-associative stream of erudite minutiae. McCormack's is a process of reduction, more precise and withholding. His language is spare, like some disquieting abridgement of a story you've heard before but remember quite differently, his overall effect as quietly compelling as Cornell's finished product. Koestenbaum's high-minded effusion recalls the kind of dandy '60s speed freak Ondine once personified. McCormack is closer in style to Warhol, employing an everyday vernacular both clipped and deceptively expansive. The polar ends are flip sides of the same coin. As Koestenbaum recently observed, Andy gave less "in order to give (secretly) more."

McCormack too casts a wide net. Like Warhol, he whittles it all down, subverting Theo's dictum into evasion through exactitude. McCormack writes masterworks in miniature. His first two novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, catalogued, in an average of roughly 150 pages or so, an ongoing obsession with ephemera: the fireworks, midway rides, Halloween ornaments, and country music stars of a bygone era. The author found himself through, and hid behind, a serial process of artful inventory – trying on various guises, enlisting various props – his stories accumulative variations on the theme of his own fanaticism. The Haunted Hillbilly: A Novel, McCormack's third novel, is half tribute, half misguided fan mail, a love letter that refashions the life of Hank Williams Sr., insinuating its author into the recipient's scheme of things with a stalker's deranged audacity.

McCormack becomes legendary Nashville couturier Nudie, hijacking Hank's and the tailor's biographies for his own selfish purposes. Similarly, after disposing of Audrey, Hank's wife, Nudie transforms the singer into a star (i.e., a functional zombie, in thrall to his master's bidding). A blood-sucking vampire, Nudie laughs in villainous block letters, like a cartoon, or a ransom note. Before meeting Hank, he worked on wax effigies for the carnival. Eventually, his ward incapacitated, he makes one in Hank's likeness. He makes one in Audrey's likeness as well. Everyone undergoes disguise and double cross of some sort in The Haunted Hillbilly. McCormack plays dress-up, then switcheroo. Through Nudie, he literalizes the fan's most possessive, God-playing impulses, draining the life from his subject in order to animate his own perverse whims. "Tailor from the crypt," Nudie makes Hank a living doll, entombing him in the shadow box casket of sexual fantasy.

The Haunted Hillbilly, like Moira Orfei, carries fandom to its illogical extremes. Nudie puts words in Hank's mouth, and even worse in his behind. Perhaps McCormack is more along the lines of an artist-collector like Henry Darger, one who envisions a threatening, slightly obscene world of wonder for his anatomically incorrect proxies to inhabit, endure, and defend. The mirror in which he sees himself through Hank is one of fun-house distortions and exhilaratingly implausible juxtapositions, so deliciously preposterous that you can barely believe what you're seeing, let alone look away.

Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes

By Wayne Koestenbaum. Soft Skull Press, 256 pages, $13.95 (paper).

The Haunted Hillbilly: A Novel

By Derek McCormack. Soft Skull Press, 112 pages, $11.95 (paper).

Brian Pera is the author of the novel Troublemaker.