The Blues

By R.Z. Sheppard

LISTENING TO BILLIE by Alice Adams Knopf; 215 pages; $7.95

For as long as one cares to remember, journalism and sociology have been the novel's boorish guests, wolfing down plots, ideologies and still smoking events in the name of fiction, although not necessarily in its spirit. Yet the novel tolerates nearly everything except a lack of persuasive characters.

Alice Adams seems marginally aware of this in her new novel whose title atmospherically refers to Blues Singer Billie Holiday. The book spans roughly 20 years: from the '50s, when an author's "sensibility" was all, to the '60s and '70s, when private ironies and quiet implosions of emotion gave way to a journalistic relevance. In current fiction that usually means female counterparts of Saul Bellow's Dangling Man. The crucial difference is that today most heroines seem free of the need to huff and puff about the Big Questions: the loss of tradition, unpardonable guilt, the death of God. They certainly never ponder man's fate.

Such reticence makes Adams' Eliza Hamilton Quarles a pallid, rather bloodless character. As a woman who came of age 20 years ago, Eliza is well versed in the arts of discretion and coping. She has to be. Her sexually ambivalent husband killed himself after becoming keen on a beautiful boy, leaving her with a baby daughter and an unfulfilled life. Eliza has little instinct for what her mother Josephine calls the "social realities." Josephine is formidable: a successful writer with another daughter and a number of former husbands left in or under the dust. She is also a hardheaded survivor of the spaghetti-and-Chianti bohemian liberalism of the '30s. "Since we are not living in a classless society," says Josephine, "there is no point in pretending that we are. I would fight for the rights of all minorities, write articles, send checks, but I would not necessarily invite them to parties in my house; they would not like it there."

Eliza confronts the injuries of class in an avowedly egalitarian society when she moves to San Francisco and takes a job in a doctor's office. Her co-workers --a working-class white and a ghetto black--initially mistrust her Eastern accent and sense of style. But Harry Argent, a blunt, flamboyant movie producer, is intermittently attracted to Eliza for what she is: "A sort of zaftig Jane Fonda," who needs not only a vocation but also a man in her bed.

By the time she hits 40, she has published poetry and watched her daughter become a child-woman of the '60s who whelps children out of wedlock. One of Eliza's former co-workers retreats to a women's commune, the other to hustling in Las Vegas. There is a rather bizarre episode reminiscent of those murky French "art movies" of the '50s: Eliza has an affair with the beautiful boy who caused her husband's suicide. She also has to di gest the fact that her half sister, too, was in love with the B.B.

The reader may have a little difficulty accepting the publisher's ebullient estimate of Listening to Billie as a novel "about a passionate modern woman moving steadily outward toward independence and success." The only admissible evidence is the author's gelid, hearsay prose, which tells but rarely shows us what happens. Most of the characters are sacrificed to vague sociological stereotypes. As a poet, Eliza is barely credible. Her special qualities of mind remain a secret that Novelist Adams seems unwilling to share.

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