Emptiness Puffed Up

THE ADAPTABLE MAN by Janet Frame. 277 pages. Braziller. $4.95.

"I, the Rev. Aisley Maude . . . woke one morning, made my usual morning adjustment to God, with my Christian faith set strongly behind me, and my human limitation protecting me from too obliterating a vision, only to find that the picture was blurred, that God had moved, that the steadfast landmark, feature of all my maps, routes, views, references, had become an unidentifiable shadow. Now, if you are photographing an ancient monument of stone, and the stone moves and the photograph is blurred, perhaps it is wise to tell no one."

The sentences are so good that they strike a hush in the mind. But the novel's perfect parts do not cohere; there is no novel.

Reverend Maude is a Church of England vicar. Tuberculous and gently tormented, he is a man with no gift for life in his own century, at ease only in his dreams of Anglo-Saxon times. In order to recuperate from his malaise, he leaves his London parish for a quiet East Suffolk village. There he lives with his brother, a dentist, who also dislikes everything modern; his brother's wife, a disappointed woman who digs in her garden as if she had lost something there; their son Alwyn, amoral, educated, cheerfully modern; and Alwyn's fiancee Jenny, who has no characteristic except marriageability.

This is what the reader sees at the outset through the author's acute eyes. But abruptly the quality of vision changes; instead of saying, "Look, deep within this character is a flaw," Novelist Frame begins to say, in effect, "how opaque is the soul, how futile to examine its surface." From this point the novel becomes a series of aimless events and objectless soliloquies. Although no one seems insane, the tensions of madness, which have preoccupied the author in her earlier writing, are injected in a mechanical and unconvincing way. Son Alwyn murders an Italian farm laborer he has never seen before, for no reason except to be in the spirit of his century. Then, acting under no apparent desire or compulsion, he seduces his mother. Much later, a large chandelier falls and kills several characters.

These happenings make no literary sense. They belong in a fashionably satiric exposition of meaninglessness, or a novel of foul disillusion of the kind written so joyously by college boys. Novelist Frame, a New Zealander who has written excellent novels (Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water) in the past, is too fine a writer to puff up emptiness in such a way.

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