Where God Is Curious

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: SHADOW PLAY

AUTHOR: CHARLES BAXTER

PUBLISHER: NORTON; 399 PAGES; $21.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A novel of the Midwest that probes privates lives, public morality and the question, Does God care or is he merely curious?

WYATT PALMER IS THE ASSIStant city manager of Five Oaks, Michigan. His wife Susan likes to walk on her hands, pull her pet rabbit out of a hat and construct miniature stage sets. Aunt Ellen is writing the Bible, and Wyatt's sweetly psychotic mother Jeanne makes up 50 cents words like nutomberized, descorbitant and corilineal, which she defines as "so normal, it's strange."

Shadow Play is definitely corilineal. Baxter's setting is conventional small-town America, but his scenes are as eerie as the realism of Edward Hopper paintings. Five Oaks is a town where history no longer takes root. Industry is elsewhere. Spirits too have up and gone. People have dusty backgrounds and odd occupations. A Palmer neighbor is a retired airline dietitian; a young woman describes herself as a Con-Tact-paper decorator.

Wyatt and Susan sometimes sound as if they were born and raised in a Garrison Keillor monologue about quirky loners and appealing blasphemers. Aunt Ellen's Scripture-in-progress posits a God that is neither loving nor vengeful, only curious. "You might as well pray to a telephone pole," she says. "I mean, if God loved us, we would know it, wouldn't we?"

Avoiding cosmic mysteries, Wyatt puts his faith in fatherhood and Five Oaks, which he hopes to make a better place. He helps an old high school friend bring WaldChem to town. The company makes plastics used in artificial body parts. But wouldn't you know that the manufacturing process also spills carcinogens, "a little hoohah," as WaldChem's cheerful president calls it.

Assistant city manager Palmer has not budgeted for evil, but neither has he made a classic Faustian bargain. How could he? In a universe where God is only curious, the devil is certainly bored, at least with Five Oaks. To convey this sense of abandonment and emptiness without losing the reader is not easy. Shadow Play could have turned into another clever existential dead end. But Baxter fills the void with a hundred human touches, a style as intimate as chamber music, and a hero who rouses himself to reject the banality that hoohah happens.