Pink Motel

''You are not here'' says the sign in the corn maze. In ''Pink Motel,'' knowledge comes enfolded in maps and diagrams, old board games, cracks in the ceiling, everything we use to tell us where we are and how we got there. What if the interstate is a mobius strip and the restaurant offers us a casserole of hearts? How, White asks, can we account for the journey that brought us to this place? This haunting book takes us from the Badlands to the subways of New York, and reminds us that the very gravity that holds us to the earth is suspect, that only language saves us from the maps that flap away like owls, the off-ramps that lead only to soybean fields, the railway station where we wait for the last train that will ever come.