NON FICTION

AN IMMACULATE MISTAKE by Paul Bailey (Dutton: $20; 176 pp.) Novelist Paul Bailey was a mistake, as his mother confessed to him before her death, and he was usually, thanks to her determined ministrations, quite immaculate. What he is not, despite her efforts, is what she would have called “natural,” by which she meant appropriate to his station in life and to his gender. Bailey, who has written a charming, poignant, extremely funny little memoir, had no interest in maintaining his family’s status quo, not when dad was a middle-aged workman and mom a servant to the Royal Family. When he was young, he wanted to be an actor, to “create”--totally improper behavior for a little boy, according to mom. And he wanted to be gay, also not part of the family plan. He charts his journey into the great unknown in elliptical anecdotes that show a delightful facility with language; much of the book has a rhythm to it that makes it almost seem like music as much as prose. The scene in which the 12-year-old Paul is introduced to the joys of heterosexual sex, in an unlikely menage-a-trois arranged by his unsuspecting parents, begs for cinematic immortality. The encounters with his enigmatic mom, including the one in which she discovers him threatening suicide, with his head on a pillow inside the gas oven, are wry and wistful, each one elegantly pared down to its essence.