The Heresy of Innocence

THE HEN'S HOUSE by Peter Israel. 255 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

In the creative imagination, the modern world shrinks more and more often into the confines of a great institution. Writers have spun whole novels out of a single metaphor: a sanatorium (Mann), a concentration camp (E. E. Cummings), a university (Barth). First Novelist Peter Israel has gone a step further. His setting is a windowless labyrinth of long corridors and locked doors; its rules and workings resemble the capriciousness of Kafka's world. Whether it is an asylum or a prison, Israel never makes clear. More than anything else, it seems to be the author's vision of the enslaved human consciousness.

At the novel's beginning, its hero, "Y," is incarcerated in a small room from which he is allowed to emerge once or twice a day in the company of a guard--and then only to visit a man who is either his warder or his psychiatrist. Y has come to think of this man as the Hen, and his prison as the Henhouse. At first, the sessions between Y and warder seem to be a form of psychotherapy. But there is something sinister in the Hen's objective; he seems to want Y to wallow in instances of minor childhood sadism. When Y balks and refuses to go to sessions, he is methodically starved. Only when his litanies of guilt sound convincing to the Hen is he introduced to a group of others like himself. Y quickly becomes their natural leader and scon decides that he, too, would make a good Hen. Then, during a Kafkaesque hearing, Y fails the crucial test: asked if he is convinced of amorphous guilt, he blurts out, "No." He is convicted of "the heresy of innocence," and sentenced to return to the real world.

Metaphysical Mystery. The reader is told nothing of Y's origin or personality; he is an abstraction. There are no women in the novel, and sex is never mentioned. Just before the trial scene, however, the book offers a few clues to Y's wherefore. Y admits to himself that he sought out the Henhouse; that he is responsible for allowing it to become a prison; that when he visualized himself as another Hen, what he really wanted was to remain a part of the system. Finally, he realizes that before he can assert his autonomy, he must relinquish the whole institutional Henhouse world and reject the paternalistic hand of psychiatry, which first helped him but now threatens to smother him. Y's journey has taken him from neurotic dependency and rebellion to a point where he can think and act on his own.

"This novel tells a story with a beginning, a middle and an end," the publishers note hopefully on the dust jacket and, surprisingly, they are correct. Though the book contains some formidable obfuscations and heavy-handed symbolism. Peter Israel writes sharp well-paced prose, and he has constructed his story as skillfully as a good mystery writer. What he has written, in fact, is a metaphysical mystery in which psychiatry plays the role of an enigmatic sleuth.

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