Still Lifes

By Paul Gray

BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL

by LARRY WOIWODE

619 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$12.95.

Near the beginning of this great Midwestern journey, Charles Neumiller supervises the home burial of his father Otto, a German Catholic immigrant who had carved an honest farm out of the unyielding North Dakota plains. Near the end, Charles himself dies and is mourned by new generations of Neumillers. Between these obituary landmarks, Charles' son Martin marries, raises a family of five reasonably normal children, moves from North Dakota to Illinois and loses his wife to uremia. That is, in effect, the whole story. The plot of Beyond the Bedroom Wall could easily fit into half a nutshell.

Humble Detritus. But incident is the least of Author Woiwode's concerns. He subtitles this novel A Family Chronicle, and the description is apt. The book's rhythm is not that of cinema but of still life. Woiwode scatters memorabilia of the Neumiller clan through 44 separate stories, some of which have appeared alone in such dissimilar magazines as The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. Most of the tales are inventories of nostalgia--the humble detritus of people who, in George Eliot's phrase, "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." With rare patience and self-evident love, Woiwode commemorates the commonplace.

At his frequent best, he makes it glow. Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a collage of preserved sensations: the "bleached, bleak infinity" of mid-America, where afternoon light fades "as though tilting over in the air toward the sun, which then draws it forward and out"; a crystalline day of fishing on a Minnesota lake; brave old houses that shudder at North Dakota blizzards but withstand them. As fondly as an oldtimer, Woiwode, 33, compares the merits of long-forgotten tractor brands (the Hart Parr, Waterloo Boy, Rumley Oil Pull) and stocks a winter larder as it was in the days before home freezers: "The potato bin was full. There were parsnips, kohlrabi, turnips and rutabagas, all dipped in paraffin to preserve them, in other bins, and carrots buried under sand."

Woiwode's polished images evoke whole landscapes and interiors. But on occasion they leave his characters as rigid as snapshots. Like the subjects of most candid portraits, the Neumillers sometimes appear querulous and unfocused, refugees wrenched by the camera from the context of their lives. The stop-and-start chapters abort their growth and development; some family members are simply dropped or disappear inexplicably for hundreds of pages. Though they struggle with life's standard challenges and disappointments, the stolid Neumillers are rarely compelling enough to carry the massive burden of their saga.

Yet even without cohesive drama or great characters, Beyond the Bedroom Wall demonstrates a fine talent for description, coupled with a Proustian ability to re-create the past. Much of Woiwode's fiction seems knit from the strands of his own life. Like the fourth generation of Neumiller children, the Manhattan-based Woiwode was born in North Dakota and spent part of his childhood in rural Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1964, he began selling articles and short stories to magazines. His first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) was an eerie portrait of modern marriage and its betrayals. (It was, perhaps, a pre-echo of his pending divorce.) The book won wide praise and whetted critical interest in this second work, which has been appearing in snippets for nearly ten years. If the fully assembled fiction is not the magnum opus that some had anticipated, its local colors and in delible miniatures more than justify a long autumn's read .

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