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Books by Sharon Lazurko ALTERED BIOGRAPHY: THE WOMB YEARS by Douglas Isaac Arsenal Pulp Press, 163 pp. Douglas Isaac’s novel Altered Biography: The Womb Years begins with a deathbed "con-version" scene. In a hospital emergency room before the final tick of the clock, true to cliché, the details of a dying man’s life pass before him. Thus the material for this autobiographical novel emerges. Also as the clock ticks, what must have been the soul in more religious times emerges from the image of a chrysalis. However, in our scientific-rational age, it is a sperm that emerges, "passes through a radiant white light in the consistency of tapioca," goes on a journey resembling a dark night on a greyhound bus, and arrives in the womb of his mother. A corresponding female death provides the ovum and a new life is conceived. This is Isaac’s first novel. He is otherwise a poet, photographer and filmmaker, and has worked at various occupations unrelated to the arts. As an aging first-wave baby boomer, memoir seems appropriate for his novel, as do thoughts on death. The novel could be a kind of myth or fable of the afterlife for the 20th century. But there is no need to worry that death will be a serious issue in this novel full of life and unusual situations. Most of the action takes place in the womb where the main characters are I and i, the masculine and feminine aspects of the developing author. The characters of Rick and Mollie, stereotypical parents of the late 1940s, are revealed mostly through I’s observations from the womb. The author appears in the narrative, characters step out of context, the author manages to have an affair with his goddess character. Imagination runs wild. Anything is possible. Isaac seems to access a switch for historical replay as he satirizes values, ideas and events of the post-Second World War era. The novel questions how it is that a generation as greedy and amoral as the baby boomers could possibly have come to be, while constructing a situation which shows how baby boomers remain babies forever and manage to never grow up. Death is outwitted and becomes irrelevant.

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