Yankee Gothic

By Annalyn Swan

GLORIA MUNDI by Eleanor Clark Pantheon; 214 pages; $8.95

Even in bedrock New England, Eleanor Clark's home territory (Baldur's Gate; Eyes, Etc.), the center no longer holds. In her latest novel, hippies, religious freaks and motorcycle gangs have invaded the hills; developers have subdivided the landscape and dispersed the natives. Everyone is adrift, "looking for something--truth, identity, ripoffs, drug deals, lost dogs, new mates, carpentry jobs, socio-political this and that."

To changing Boonton, Vt. comes Margo Philipson, a dumpy Michigan housewife with a history of kidney trouble and a well-developed martyr's complex. She is searching for her missing husband, a handsome minister who she secretly believes married her as an act of self-punishment. The Rev. Philipson was supposedly killed five years earlier, when his small plane crashed in the Canadian woods. But he has been spotted near Boonton by a hippie who once lived next door to the Philipsons back in Michigan.

Margo eventually finds her husband, who faked the accident in order to disappear discreetly with a girl half his age. But by then, Margo's own affairs (including one with the reformed Boonton drunk) are no longer so simple. Neither, unfortunately, is the novel. Into just 214 pages Clark crams, along with Margo's story, the restlessness, trials, past deeds and dreams of a score of other characters. There are Hannah Palz, a motherly musician-in-residence; Jim Pace, an unscrupulous real estate dealer; Brit Horton, a grizzled farmer; Mercy Grout, the local adventuress. There are also touches of Southern gothic in the Northern woods: a sex maniac murders and mutilates two hikers, and a motorcycle gang leaves one dead and another paralyzed.

Attempting to preserve unity in this welter of people and subplots, Clark resorts to some by now familiar techniques. She cuts rapidly back and forth between characters and blends past, present and future: "Right now she was still in the same ugly, dun-colored frame house on a side street in Michigan, feeling poorly as usual, without a thought of setting out for anywhere, and a certain southbound pair of hikers were still at the Canadian end of the Long Trail, a long way from the Boonton crossing where a very different couple would shortly be murdered. Not that the two leaving Canada had any particular stopping-place in mind." This is the sort of writing that requires the talent and passion of a Faulkner. Clark only succeeds in complicating an already overloaded story.

A winner of a National Book Award (for The Oysters of Locmariaquer, 1964), Clark combines an elegant prose style with a richly lyrical gift. But her true metier is nonfiction, which better serves her discerning eye. Readers of Oysters or Rome and a Villa will not be surprised to find that the best thing in Gloria Mundi is her evocation of New England's character and countryside.--Annalyn Swan

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