Sex, God, and Desitin Darcey Steinke’s date with Onan BY JULIA HANNA
	Milk By Darcey Steinke. Bloomsbury, 144 pages, $17.95.

Sex, sex, sex. Is that all Darcey Steinke can write about? Milk, her fourth novel, demonstrates her ongoing fascination with the intersection between the physical world and spiritual enlightenment, particularly when it involves a mind-bending orgasm. In her 1992 novel Suicide Blonde, Steinke wrote of one young woman’s search for identity through a sexual tour of San Francisco’s underbelly. Mary, her primary character in Milk, is a bit more domestic — she’s married and lives in Brooklyn with her infant son — but just as urgent in her yearning to attain some fuller understanding and sense of completeness in life.

Mary’s husband is more interested in sweet young things with names like China and Sonya than in his post-partum wife, so she leaves him to live in the rectory of the Episcopal church where her friend Walter is a priest. She also begins a relationship with John, an AWOL monk she meets in a coffee shop. The three form a trinity of loss and longing: Walter is mourning the death of his gay lover, and John still carries a faded snapshot of the pregnant wife he lost long ago to a roadside accident. Meanwhile, Mary is doing a lot of breastfeeding and praying — two activities that aren’t as disconnected as they sound. The Milk of the book’s title represents more than sustenance for Mary’s baby; it’s the life force that connects us all. "Usually her milk was exclusively for the baby, but occasionally the sweet liquid came for flood victims on television and when the homeless man asked her for a quarter. Sometimes she leaked milk when the neighbor’s dog barked or at the memory of how excited her mother got during her favorite TV show."

As a new mother and newly single woman, Mary is in a constant, almost painful state of hypersensitivity to the world around her, a condition reflected in many painstakingly observed details and a growing obsession with God and alternate planes of existence. "It’s possible, right, if we find the right posture, the correct way to hold our skeleton, the door between this dimension and the next will fly open and there’ll be only the slightest difference in density between myself and my dead mother?", Mary asks Walter. She is becoming, by his account, "a sort of spooky chick." She sees an aleph in the form of sparks falling from the ceiling, for example, and tries to re-create the effect by hanging tiny mirrors from the ceiling with dental floss. And masturbation for Mary is an opportunity to meditate on more than mere physical pleasure: "Only God could infuse something so rudimentary with life. She was made out of cosmic refuse — stardust, smoky vapor — and so occasionally if she concentrated, she could tease down the life force for her own selfish use. She sank her finger inside herself, and really, though she didn’t mean to brag, she was ridiculously wet and decided therefore to split the universe."

Sex offers access to the spiritual but is grounded in the physical. "Just the thing against the other thing," Walter thinks as he gives a blow job to a "blond boy" in the back room of a bar on one of his occasional sorties into casual sex. "Just the bottom of a glass against a wood table or a chair pressed up against a wall. The thing against the other thing; that was the most human of all, the most embodied, not flesh infused with spirit. . . . It was holy no matter how sleazy the circumstance, as it was the sensation beyond the reach of God." Everything in Milk is an opportunity for philosophical musing and insight. (The acknowledgments include "the work and ideas of Thomas Merton.") If an ivy plant fascinates Mary’s baby, perhaps, she thinks, that’s because "he could read the consciousness of objects. . . . He got as much from watching the aura around a lightbulb as the expression on her face."

Yet as eloquent as it may be in considering the æthereal matters of God, spirituality, sex, and other planes of being, Milk never really gets off the ground. Mary, John, and Walter get a section of the book each in which to tell their story. There are plot-like developments along the way — Walter struggles to keep the church open and his attraction to a teenage handyman at bay, for example, and Mary’s baby is hospitalized with a mysterious illness — but none of it adds up to anything consequential. The narrative returns to Mary’s perspective for a few concluding pages that show her becoming a little more grounded, but don’t expect a ringing finale or a transformative moment. Steinke is interested in the ideas generated by her characters’ spiritual journeys; the story is beside the point.

Darcy Steinke reads this Tuesday, March 1, at 7:30 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton, on March 1; call (617) 244-6619.