Locked in a Star

By Martha Duffy

ENCHANTMENT by Linda Grace Hoyer. 209 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

To describe his feelings as an only child living with his parents and grandparents in a small Pennsylvania town, John Updike once wrote, "The five of us already there locked into a star that would have shattered like crystal at the admission of a sixth." In this remarkable first novel published under her maiden name, Updike's 66-year-old mother quotes the passage reverently and adds, "Luckily the star was, in its small way, a navigational star."

That she would include her son's work in her own narrative--helpfully adding the source--gives an idea of how naive her writing can be. Mrs. Updike has published several stories in The New Yorker since she took up her new career ten years ago, but her "novel" is really a semidramatized memoir.

The author totally lacks her son's blinding talent for description, his eerie access to the treasures of evocative memory. Luckily she does not even try to compete. Enchantment is almost dizzily free of the usual paraphernalia of fiction. What is left is a curiously powerful concentration of fierce emotion. If the book misses the wonder of that five-pointed star, it admirably conveys the sensation of being locked in.

The prison is married life in a poor, dull town. Belle, as the author calls herself, was born angry. Her adored father warned: "Beware of cross women." Her mother, already disappointed at the girl's plainness, added, "You will scare the boys if you look like that." But Belle quickly finds herself a breezy chap named George Ames, who looks like her father. Somehow she assumes George shares her unformed aspirations.

Disillusionment sets in on the honeymoon. Belle decides she rates a taxi instead of a crowded trolley that reminded her "of the horrors I've already survived." Inquiring into the exact nature of these horrors, George observes that she had never even been hungry. "I have been hungry," she storms. "I'm hungry right now."

She was ravening for a richer, more expansive life she could only dimly envision. Mocked by reality, she blames her husband, sometimes ludicrously. When she tries to earn some money on a quiz show and quickly loses, she feels the air about her filled with an ectoplasmic George. He in turn has the affronting frankness to tell her that he married her for her amusement value. Another fizzled fantasy. "But you said you wanted me to help you," she wails. Later, when years of poverty have taken the resilience out of both domestic warriors, George's tongue is at least as bitter as his wife's. After her mother's death he says: "I don't want to live with you--without her."

The navigational star in Belle's life is an only child, Eric. Totally enthralled and devoted, Belle lives through him, confides in him. Later--when he begins to publish--she bridles at anyone who has not heard of him.

It is hard to reconcile George Ames with the warm, patient George Caldwell of The Centaur, whom Updike modeled on his father. Seeing Belle as the bitchy mother in Of the Farm is easier. When Eric's fiancee laughs in embarrassment at one of George's most bitter comments, Belle purrs, "How nice it must be to be so lovely that hatred amuses you." Still, she knows herself: "The sensation of falling in a dream always ends with the relief of waking up, but from the sensations of a mother-in-law there would be no awakening."

Ruminating about the difficulties of transposing life into art, Updike wrote, "From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm." He is wrong, really, for this artless book obliquely manages to re-create the emotional blizzard that made him into an artist.

. Martha Duffy

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