Nigel Watts. WE ALL LIVE IN A HOUSE CALLED INNOCENCE (Sceptre, #5.99).

* ''SOMETIMES I wish I could take my brain out and stamp on it,'' says

James, the protagonist of this terrifically honest book, and for the

first few chapters the reader's response is Yo! Go for it! James is a

sexist pig of the creepiest kind; he resents and fears women and can

hardly look at gays, and his hobby is self-loathing.

All us guys know James. We went to school with him. He works beside us

and stands beside us in the Gents. This James lives in all of us, in the

little corner of the soul that knows that sex is a shaky idea and

deviance is bad news.

But when James meets Tad (short for tadpole), a wheelchair-bound gay

writer, his life changes utterly. A terrible beauty is born when he

starts to like himself, women, and gays, and not in any particular

order. James works in a library, but it is not Conan the Librarian we

see develop, rather Conan the Fully Rounded Human Being. Pornography

becomes eroticism and hate becomes love, all embedded in elegant and

complex prose that lays bare the nature of male insecurity and its

allied game-playing. -- I. B.