Arabesque

By Martha Duffy

HONOR TO THE BRIDE LIKE THE PIGEON THAT GUARDS ITS GRAIN UNDER THE CLOVE TREE by Jane Kramer. 211 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Honor to the Bride, etc. is just what its title is not: brief, deft, racy and funny. Set in the Moroccan city of Meknes, it is a kind of Arab shaggy-dog story that happens to be true.

The hero and heroine are Omar ben Allel and his wife Dawia, who live with six of their children in three rooms in a ramshackle section of the city. The key child is their daughter, Khadija, her parents' "most negotiable piece of property." As a 13-year-old virgin, she should fetch a handsome bride price --but then she is abducted.

Her parents recover Khadija, no longer in negotiable condition, and immediately plunge into hilarious legal struggles to reassert her virginity. To their astonishment, they discover that the girl still has suitors. In fact, by the book's end, Omar is counting up the dowry. The wedding ritual is complete with the virgin's epithalamium--the book's title.

Honor to the Bride is an excellent example of the "nonfiction novel"--the literary genre Truman Capote regrets ever having invented. The plot complications are as intricate as an arabesque. They entangle myriad relatives, neighbors, judges, seers and policemen, each sketched with a few vivid strokes, all involved yet all laughing at the convoluted action.

Ideal Foils. Jane Kramer, 31, a New Yorker staff writer, got her story by virtually living with Omar and Dawia for six months. She had come to Meknes with her anthropologist husband, Vincent Crapanzano, who was doing field work. In the book the Crapanzanos are thinly disguised as M. and Mme. Hugh, young American writers living near by. As Western pragmatists, they make ideal foils for the other characters. When Khadija vanishes, M. Hugh wants to charge down to the police station to start the wheels of orderly investigation. Having saved face by blaming the calamity on various "invisibles," or devils jealous of Khadija, the family prefers methods far more circuitous and transcendental.

Beyond its entertainment value, the book offers a remarkable glimpse into the personal lives of Arab multitudes, Arab attitudes toward justice, money and women become apparent as one microcosm of society applies its energies to Omar's dilemma. Thanks to the author's effortless narrative, the reader hurtles through an exotic world, not realizing until the end that he has been taken on a fascinating trip through the Arab mind.

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