Deafening Roar

By John Skow

ANGEL OF LIGHT by Joyce Carol Gates Dutton; 434 pages; $15.50

There has always been something off-putting about the fiction of Joyce Carol Gates, even when, as in her short stories, it is at its most controlled and least melodramatic. What sets the teeth on edge is not the appalling prolificacy that has driven her to turn out 13 novels, eleven collections of stories, three books of criticism and five volumes of poetry in less than two decades while maintaining a full university schedule. It is not the author's bloodthirstiness-- her plots are more sanguinary even than real life in the 20th century-- or the unvarying over burden of emotions that lies on all of her characters and all of her situations.

The sense of monstrousness that arises from her work seems to have its source in an unbridgeable gap between the highly rational and ordered intelligence of the writer, and the chaos and hysteria of nearly everything she writes about. Thus, perhaps, her chronic melodrama, her pumping of more emotion into situations than they have been built to withstand.

The latest model from the Gates fiction factory, Angel of Light, is an anthology of the author's excesses. The flaccid, irritating soap opera is jerry-built around the hatreds of a wealthy family in Washington, D.C. A senior bureaucrat, Maurice Halleck, head of the "Commission for the Ministry of Justice," has died, apparently by suicide, after seeming to confess to bribe taking. Halleck's two nearly grown children, drug-frazzled Kirsten and lard-witted Owen, vow to wreak vengeance on their gorgeous mother Isabel, and their father's best friend from boyhood, whom they take to be the killers. Here, as elsewhere, the author has far more energy than her characters, who sag into torpor when she busies herself with other scenes and lurch groggily back into motion when she summons them again.

Terrorists enter the situation, although not explosively enough or early enough to save the book. The reader is trapped for lengthy incoherent chapters in the minds of Owen and his sister, specimens who would have a psychiatrist looking at his watch well before the end of each 50-minute hour. The only breaks come in equally long and profitless flashbacks to the boyhood of Maurice Halleck. The writing here is of the "It was a dark and stormy night" variety that Snoopy, the Peanuts dog, concocts whenever he tries to write his own novel. Halleck and his friend take a canoe trip, and he is nearly drowned in "the deafening roar" of the wild Loughrea. This is a Celtic place name, used for a Canadian river. But it sounds almost exactly like logorrhea, and in this sibylline choice, abused readers will take malicious pleasure. --By John Skow

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