Sleeping Beauty

THE DESERT by Allen Wheelis. 163 pages. Basic Books. $5.95.

Like the platypus, a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal, this book should not work but does. It is part love story, part lecture in existential psychoanalysis, and part rumination on the frayed bootstraps of mankind. Altogether, Allen Wheelis' novel does far more than merely survive on its own terms in its own special territory.

Max Archer, the narrator-hero of the story section, is--like Wheelis himself --a San Francisco psychoanalyst. Fortyish and divorced, Archer regularly sees his patients, consults with his colleagues, plays a little chess and a lot of women. He is a man of few illusions who expects little and usually settles for less.

The villain is Scott Craig, a freelance film maker with a terminal case of what psychologists call affectlessness. Like a jet-set Sade, he rushes around the world anxiously seeking aesthetic forms through which to resolve his conflicts and act out his sexual obsessions. Craig's films include features about his secretary's sensuous mouth, copulating dolphins, even a reel starring a belly dancer's navel that smiles, frowns, bites and becomes a puckered keyhole through which a documentary collage of 20th century horrors may be ogled. Out of context, the man sounds comical. But the harder he pursues his pathetically deformed efforts to feel alive, the more destructive he gets.

The principal victim of Craig's compulsive degradation is his wife Ariana. Not only does he leave her at home for long periods, but when he returns he insists on telling her detailed stories of his infidelities. To triangulate Ariana's problem, Max Archer is in love with her. After initial hesitations, she returns his love. But despite beautiful times together, she is incapable of leaving Craig.

By virtue of his position as narrator, Archer is the character of greatest dimension. Craig and Ariana are more like vivified case histories. Taken together, they become an eternal threesome whose antecedents can be found in myths about princes salvaging damsels from evil spellbinders. In Wheelis' tale, though, the hero must fight without magic weapons or supernatural sponsors--conditions that do not ensure happy endings. In Craig, what once might have been thought to be evil is now seen as psychosis. Ariana is Sleeping Beauty, but no kiss is going to awaken her from the stupor that keeps her with Craig.

Economy and Tact. As case history, Ariana's problem is not uncommon. She is unable to choose happiness over despair because her will has been paralyzed. In Wheelis' view, the cause is not only Craig's outrages but the subtly pervasive spirit of the age. Behaviorists, technophiles and their parrots in the social sciences have overemphasized the lock step of instinct at the expense of free will. For many people, the result is a form of fatalism that destroys belief in the possibility of change.

In the book only Archer, a man of enlightened desperation, can make the imaginative effort necessary to understand that for practical purposes, man is what he does. Like many a brave individual before him, he comes to the hard knowledge that blindness to human possibilities is like ignorance of the law. In both cases, one is guilty by default.

Wheelis interrupts his story a number of times with general discussions of personal inertia, freedom and will. Because these talks are jargon-free and meditative in tone, they do not distract from the fictional narrative. If anything, they heighten the reader's involvement in a story written with exceptional economy and tact.

Despite its incongruities of form, The Desert is an exciting, even a profound modern document. Its philosophical underwriters are Husserl, Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist who provided a much-needed addendum to Freud. Binswanger gently argued that the undefinable human spirit is as powerful a drive as instinct--if indeed the two theoretical categories can be separated in practice at all. Fusing spirit and instinct, theory and fiction, Wheelis' risky work gives a unique life to Binswanger's philosophical view.

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