Such issues of ethnicity and class echo and refract throughout the book. The protagonist of ''Snow'' finds his true nature when his boss, meaning to insult him, calls him an Indian. In another story an Anglo woman treats her Mexican housesitter as both a sexual curiosity and a hedge against her own loneliness. In similar fashion, the individual women in these stories are all aspects of a single, totemic idea of Woman. As the book's title suggests, we get not portraits but images, not fine brush strokes but broad lines.
Women are seductive, mysterious, haunting, powerful.
He was so sick of her, of his want of her,'' one of these men says. Women are deities in a mythology of the flesh, their body parts invoked as litanies of prayer. Then in ''Bottoms'' the whole notion of sexual bewilderment is given a hilarious turn, as a man yearning for a lost lover and disturbed by reading a gay novel is ravished by an enormous woman who squeezes in through his bedroom window. These are rewarding, if somewhat uneven stories. Readers who happen to be women may not recognize themselves in Gilb's titanic figures.