The Canker in the Rose

WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK by L. Woiwode. 309 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/roux. $5.95.

The man's talent is even more notable than his name. With only a few New Yorker stories and poems as warmups, L. (Larry) Woiwode (pronounced Why-v/ood-ee) has staged the best three-way confrontation between a young man, life and the Michigan woods since Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. If a better first novel than this one appears in 1969, it will be a remarkable year.

At first, the book seems to be an agreeable juvenile confection. The plot is almost conventionally simple and contemporary. A 23-year-old graduate student named Chris marries a 21-year-old coed-dropout named Ellen, with whom he has slept on and off for three years. The tone inclines rakishly toward the comic. Ellen is pregnant, and the marriage has to be a bit of a scramble. There is a mad, drunken bus ride on the part of the groom. In a scene of smothered hilarity, the couple receive spiritual instructions (and an introductory sex manual) from a young minister with a crew cut.

But shadows keep falling across the story. Those grandparents of Ellen who purse their lips in disapproval but lend their Michigan lodge for the honeymoon are less comic old folks than vaguely sinister agents provocateurs. Nor is the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan the Garden of Eden it appears to the two children, pretending like every young couple to be the only, the original man and woman on earth. After lyrically celebrating the pleasures of lovemaking, Woiwode begins softly terrorizing paradise. Ghostly presences appear progressively more foreboding: the stuffed animals on the wall, the mice in the piano, night tappings at the window, dead birds, the smell of carrion. Above all, there are intruding memories: her dead parents, his live ones; the half-forgotten other lovers.

Slowly, painfully, they begin to learn about the enemies of love, without and within. Chris loses sleep, then appetite, finally ardor. Convinced that "some dark thing was overtaking him," he buys a rifle and lugs it everywhere. As the child within her grows, Ellen retreats to her own childhood, resurrecting the toys in the lodge attic. Seeking reassurance, the pair try the ritual of childhood games--Parcheesi, Chinese checkers--then break off even this relationship. Chris teaches Ellen to shoot. At last all they share is the gun, as if the final game were to be a game of kill. More and more, the birth they await seems a kind of impending death.

How they survive, and on what terms with love and life, is the heart of the book and the measure of Woiwode's worldly wisdom. He throws off bit characters--an Indian clerk in the general store, an old farmer down the road --with the sort of spendthrift brilliance that measures an abundant talent. He handles those woods with the care and exactness of a naturalist. In short, at 27, he is already a novelist one can trust. Past blitheness, but not up to bitterness, Woiwode treats life (and death) with unstinting tenderness. He knows the price of love--and he knows the cost of living without it.

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