Unholy Trinity

IN TRANSIT by Brigid Brophy. 230 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Brigid Brophy, the Irish controversialist, classics scholar, champion of animal rights and vegetarian, continues her war on the 20th century. In Transit, her sixth novel, takes the fight underground, where it is more likely to be seen. The book is a highly cerebral contrivance that cannibalizes such literary conceits as puns, anagrams, typographical innovations, styles of alienation and cultural shock. These are then excreted as parodic wastes, which, in turn, become a further source of nourishment. With such transcendent offalness, Miss Brophy seeks a form suited to her view of the times.

Her central conception is impressive enough. The modern world is an airport waiting room, "one of the rare places where twentieth-century design is happy with its own style." Life beneath this vaulted metaphor is amorphous, ambiguous, oysterous. Culture, history, psychology, and even physiology are hopelessly confused.

So is Evelyn Hilary O'Rooley, the novel's bifocal, bivocal, bisexual narrator. Although E.H.O'R. can be anagrammed as HERO, the character is doubtful of its gender. Most accurately, (s)he is Miss Brophy's way of saying "I." It is a mock "I," however. As Miss Brophy notes in an aside: "I'm playing games, like a painter who includes in his picture a mirror in which he shows himself standing outside the picture painting it."

In the world-as-airport, Evelyn-Hilary-Brophy-"I" falls in with a number of atrocities: a TV quiz show whose panel attempts to discover the favorite perversions of its guests; lesbian and youth rebellions; a nun hunt, and a plane crash engineered to secure human organs for transplants. In such an environment, rationalism mutates into absurd rationalization. Like rebellious cancer cells, words metastasize into puns and compound forms that lead destructive lives of their own.

Naturally enough, one of the many sponsors of In Transit is James Joyce, "my great Triestine compalien, the comedichameleon, the old pun gent himself." The punning and the aesthetic trinity of Evelyn Hilary, the fictional "I" and Miss Brophy herself persist with vengeful logic to the very end. There, on the last page, the author signs off with a drawing of a fish with the word fin on its fin. Does it mean the end, or does Miss Brophy expect us to follow indefinitely in Finnegans wake like so many gulls?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.