Examined Lives

By Paul Gray

THE GOAT, THE WOLF, AND THE CRAB

by GILLIAN MARTIN 186 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

Hannah Jackson, 42, is told by her doctor that she has cancer of the cervix. Fortunately the disease is at an early stage. One operation and then Hannah can resume the life of a middle-class English suburban housewife. She says no. She will take the two years remaining to her, thank you, and call it a life. Irked at having his advice dismissed so airily, and by a woman to boot, the doctor asks Hannah why. "I have not done anything at all without someone else's interests being the prime factor," she replies. "This is the last opportunity. I insist on doing this in my own way."

There are several ways in which a novel based on such a premise could run rapidly downhill. It could sour into morbidity or fist-shaking stridency or traipse into a misty, philosophical meadow, where every delicious moment is the first one of the rest of our lives. This tightly constructed first novel makes no such blunders. English Author Gillian Martin uses Hannah's perverse decision as an occasion not to settle old scores but to examine some unexamined lives.

Hannah's is the most fully studied, since the story is chiefly seen through her eyes. Her bouts of introspection are awkward, because she is unaccustomed to looking at herself except as an extension of her husband and children. Her audacity in refusing surgery puzzles her: "She does not mislead herself that she wants to die. Rather she wants to stop living her life." But why is she incapable of starting anew? The answers, not all satisfactory, come piecemeal.

Hannah blames her mother for teaching her that life's greatest virtue is snug security, and she regrets the husband, the only man she has ever known, who so perfectly lived up to her mother's ideal. Most of all she blames herself for spending her years listening rather than thinking.

The novelist keeps Hannah's dilemma in the foreground without ignoring its effect on those around her. Gestures like Hannah's shake the pillars of society; friends and loved ones are forced to reassess her life and theirs. Especially torn is Hannah's husband, who is treated as anything but the ogre who pops up in much current feminist fiction. A well-meaning man who has be come the "bill-paying machine" everyone expected him to be, Henry Jackson first tries to bully and then to cajole Hannah into the operating room. He argues sensibly that she is chasing after a romantic ideal, unattainable in life and certainly in death. "I'm a good dentist," he tells her. "And I might have been a good artist instead, if I'd had a chance to try. But I don't want the chance."

Hannah wants the chance but, as Martin shows, cannot have it. A brief affair with a charming but faithless acquaintance ends badly--and produces most of the novel's few patches of uncertain writing. Hannah's lover "begins to play on her body like a musician on an instrument" -- a cliche that strikes a discordant note no matter what the tune.

Such slips are rare. The Goat, the Wolf, and the Crab raises troubling questions about the worth of inherited values; it engages the mind as well as the emo tions. The line between this novel and a three-handkerchief tearjerker is the hard edge of truth.

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