Polyperse

APPLESAUCE by June Arnold. 240 pages. McGraw-Hill. $4.95.

A great many writers nowadays are hung up on the psychological-fantasy novel. Their common theme is not so much alienated man as the phenomenon of what might be called the polyperse--the several conflicting personalities in a single character. Unafraid, Virginia Woolf was one of the pioneers of the form; in Orlando, the hero starts out as a man and winds up as woman. More recently, lohn Fowles's The Magus dealt with a girl who was possibly 1) a ghost, 2) a nymphomaniac, 3) an actress, or 4) twins. Peter Israel's The Hen's House is filled with shifting symbolic identities, and Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de Rendez-vous is peopled with so many polyperses that the reader has to beat them off with a stick.

Comforted by Affluence. Marriage is the frequent setting for these identity crises. The housewife sees it as a den of snakes, resents childbirth, old age, her husband's masculinity (or lack of it), the act of love, a male universe, and possibly George Washington's birthday. The husband is comforted neither by apples, affluence, martinis, the Democrats, nor a dead God. The partners turn inward--defeated by teenyboppers, Red China, polluted air, Kinsey's statistics, retreating hairlines, wash day, the office bastard, a pot-smoking son, Leda's swan, the snows of yesteryear. They devour each other and emerge as One, shrieking. It is better to have loved and flipped than never to have loved at all.

What all this can lead to is somewhat frighteningly illustrated by Applesauce, a first novel by June Arnold, a 40-year-old South Carolina divorcee. Putting the required and wearisome ingredients in her wearing blender, she mixed Freud, lunacy, imagery, symbolism and convoluted time. It came out something like this:

There is this fella Gus Ferrarri, whose wife is three people: Eloise ("round and sensual"), Rebecca ("wiry"), and Lila ("boneless"). Gus is 45, a 32nd-degree schizo who does not venture outside his New York apartment for 30 months; he is building a room within a room to become "the inside of his own skin." His three-year-old son asks him: "You're Mommy, aren't you?" The answer: "No. Your mommy is dead. Understand that! . . . All the mommies are dead. I am a monster who makes all the mommies die; I am a mommy-murdering monster, do you hear?" To his mirrored image: "I am simply trying to discover who I am--in the abstract sense."

What Color Brain? If there really was an Eloise, she drove off a bridge to her death. If there really was a Rebecca, she either committed suicide by drowning or the sharks ate her. If there was a Lila, she climbed an apple tree and fell to her death. And if there really was a Gus, he was a psychological basket case: "I did relate emotionally. I have no idea what color his brain was ... He had green eyes and a face of shifting flesh, and a name something like Charlie." Or maybe Eloise or Rebecca or Lila.

In a lucid moment, Author Arnold explains on the dust jacket that "the marrieds are like apples. Some shed their peel, that they may be closer. Others keep their peel but sacrifice their core on the altar of love. Some can live this way. Some--like Gus--are reduced to applesauce." In the abstract sense, right?

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