FICTION

PATTY DIPHUSA and Other Writings by Pedro Almodovar (Faber and Faber: $18.95; 155 pp.). Filmmaker Almodovar (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” among others) likes to think of himself as the Spanish Andy Warhol. In Spanish, patidifusa means flabbergasted, and Almodovar seems determined to have exactly that effect on his reader. His alter ego calls herself an international porn star, and in her writings she talks about rape and anonymous desire as casually as Martha Stewart chats about party manners. Patty’s essays are an unsettling souvenir of the 1980s--self-consciously clever, insistently outrageous . . . but a bit dated, after all. Nothing she says seems as wild as it might have been when she wrote it, certainly not as radical as she and Almodovar would like it to seem. Time has played a rather nasty trick on the international party crowd of the last decade. The aggressive pursuit of the startling good time seems a little harsh, a little foolish, and more than a little empty at the center. Almodovar is charming enough, if a bit too offhand for someone who’s been fortunate enough to be collected between hard covers, but these are the Oakland of essays: There’s not a lot of there there.