A Little Downside Sabbatical A WOMAN NAMED DROWN

By Paul Gray

The perils of first novelists have been widely, even lugubriously described. The typical sad story can be summarized with dispatch: unresponsive agents, inattentive publishers, small printings, nonexistent publicity, scattered reviews, laughable sales. Sometimes, though, this scenario breaks down. A few first novels are rapturously received, their authors transformed overnight from supplicants to stars. Then, amid the giddiness of recognition, the problem of the second novelist attacks in its most intimidating strain. What to do for an encore is one symptom, but there is worse: the knowledge that the next book, unlike the first, will have the power to disappoint a lot of people.

Author Padgett Powell, 35, has weathered this ordeal nicely. To be sure, a few readers will complain that his second novel fails to live up to the promise of Edisto, which drew raves and comparisons to Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye when it appeared in 1984. A Woman Named Drown is not going to remind anyone of Anna Karenina. On the other hand, Powell's new book picks up smoothly where its predecessor left off, which is not, given the level of skills evident throughout Edisto, a bad place to begin.

Instead of a twelve-year-old growing up on a marshy island off the South Carolina coast, the hero-narrator this time is a graduate student working toward his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in Tennessee. His first name seems to be Al, and the subject of his jottings, which make up this book, is the remarkable change he experiences after receiving a letter from his girlfriend of six years, who is doing postdoctoral work in Norway, "letting me know in the subtlest, happiest way imaginable that I would not be joining her there as we had planned upon completion of my degree." Being jilted is nothing new, as nearly everyone who has ever lived could testify, but Al takes a laboratory technician's interest in his own ensuing depression. He quits graduate school and renounces all plans for his future, meanwhile recording the relevant data of his rebellion: "So what I started that day was apparently a series of impulses which qualified for my interest if I could detect no point in them at all."

He happily subjects himself to a "continuum of nuttiness." He finds work at a tent factory ("I felt fine, a fine idiot doing a fine idiot job") and begins frequenting Bilbo's Bar, Gym & Grill, sparring occasionally, drinking a lot and hanging out with folks "who are anything but custodians of their chances in life." The first hint that all this aimlessness may be leading him somewhere comes when he moves in with Mary Constance Baker, an older woman, amateur actress and local celebrity, best known for her starring role in a play called A Woman Named Drown. In fact, this performance has given her the urge to get away for a while; after playing a woman accused of sleeping with a black, Mary thinks some of her Knoxville neighbors have started to harbor the same suspicion about her. Before long, Mary gives Al all of her late husband Stump's golfing togs, packs him into her Mercury and takes off for Florida.

"Me and Stump believed in a differnt kind of Florida," she tells him, and the actress and her young charge stay pretty far off the beaten path. "We took a room in a place called Hotel that had no desk, no desk clerk, no keys, no locks on doors. Rooms were open for a kind of self-registering. The procedure was to sleep and pay later." They spend long, leisurely spells watching migrant workers and take in such sights as "Chico's Monkey Emporium, Floyd's Go-Cart Royale, a Hep-Ur-Sef station, the Daytona Pamplona (a Cuban disco, we think)." Eventually Mary tells Al that their time together is over: "She was closing a very successful road show and meant for us, as actors, to move on."

The hero's addled odyssey is by no means over, but its purpose by this time has become clear. Powell performs some extremely deft and tricky variations on a plot that is as old as fiction itself: the education of a young man on the open road. Taking a "little downside sabbatical" from his lockstep life so far, Al learns to appreciate "the beauty of failure, the glory of the fancy end run around importance." He becomes a connoisseur of "lateral waste." And he arrives back where he started a mildly wiser fellow: "There is room in this world for either a whole lot of coincidence or a whole lot of design, call it what you will."

But the moral is by no means the whole point of this story. A Woman Named Drown is extravagantly comic, an exercise in word spinning for the sheer uncertainty and pleasure of what might pop out next. Perhaps it is the woman who buys a blouse with sleeves too long and looks, in consequence, like a "rayon ape." Maybe it is the hero's dipsomaniacal mother, who takes another drink, "which she bites down on like a snake volunteering venom into a toxin funnel." One of Al's insights runs as follows: "It seems to me that people are ready to hear things never heard before so long as they are not frightened for their physical safety or worried that listening may cost them money." There is a price on this novel, but it will not harm a soul.