Present Imperfect

HIND'S KIDNAP by Joseph McElroy. 534 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Joseph McElroy's startling first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, was about a man trying to invent a world and then smuggle himself into the lives of his invented and remembered populace. In the author's second novel, Hind's Kidnap, the protagonist is obsessed by the search for a kidnaped four-year-old child, as well as a hunt for clues to his own early background, and the attempt to dekidnap himself and all his friends who have been stolen away from their childhood into an adopted adulthood. The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result is an often funny, painfully intense psychological detective story filled with Double-Crostics, Nabokovian word games and revelations that tantalizingly obscure as much as they reveal.

Prompted by notes left in his mailbox by an old crone, Jack Hind renews the quest he had abandoned for Hershey Laurel, a suburban family's kidnaped child. Curiously, the clues all lead to Hind's friends and then back to his own wife and child, whom he has neglected, and finally back to an exploration of himself. Hind, self-consciously tall at 6 ft. 7 in., does not know his own parents and was brought up by a guardian whose strict moral precepts still order his life. Perhaps this is why Hind gradually comes to think of himself as the savior of what McElroy calls the "placental" city. Hearing the police emergency siren, Hind "imagined vehicles fading to the side to give way, his own long arms stretching over the heights and depths of the city to whatever injured or dead or suicidal person or persons the truck was going to."

Hind becomes the almost ludicrous pursuer of a lost cause whose tangled effects obfuscate his thinking. Clues ravel in his memory until the past becomes present and all of life is poured into one densely occupied moment. "Hooked with a wood into the forest, it will lead you well beyond the pier," states one clue. Does it refer to the golf course owned by Hind's friend Ashley Sill, where one may hook the ball into the trees? Or does it mean the huge fishhook stuck in the ironwood outside the Laurel home, from where Hershey was taken? Or does it refer to his friends Dewey Wood and de Forrest? Most of his acquaintances have the names of plants or trees: Maddy Beecher, Oliver Plane, Ivy Bowles, Lief Lund. John Plante, Cassia Meaning. Or is Cassia Meaning a pun on catch ya meaning? The word plays are both frivolous and serious, representing "the mind's fierce fuss, forever discontinuous."

It is just that discontinuity that Hind seeks to solve, finally turning away from the kidnap because he realizes that if he continues, he will have to use his friends as means, presenting them as exhibits in his case against the world. Instead, he resolves to start all over by pursuing them as ends in themselves --tracing out the lost person in each one, until the crime is uncovered and the child in each is freed.

It requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed. Along the way, it is often difficult to see de Forrest for the trees --even with, or from, what McElroy calls "Hind's height."

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