Little Women

By Martha Duffy

ENTERING EPHESUS by Daphne Athas. 442 pages. Viking. $7.95.

In 1939, the Bishops with their three daughters arrive in Ephesus, a tiny college town in the South. They are destitute, and despite the war boom that is about to start, they stay that way, thanks to father's "ruthlessness about the unimportance of money." What the Bishops do have plenty of is "Bishopry" -an elusive but tensile esprit that makes them feel different, not to say unique.

Entering Ephesus is about being adolescent in that family, and the author manages to make most practitioners in the crowded coming-of-age field seem calculating and niggardly indeed. This is not one of those tightly written, masterly constructed narratives of one watershed season when "Everything Changed." It is an ungainly, exhilarating chronicle of five years in which things changed and changed and changed.

Cerebral Lovers. The father, known as P.Q., is a freethinking, argumentative intellectual who runs a tatty laundry, more or less when he feels like it. His wife is a pliant, childlike female, very like their eldest and prettiest daughter, Irene. Most of the novel is devoted to Urie, who is 13 when the book begins; she is an avowed bluestocking blessed with ambition and "a thick ego." Then there is Sylvia, 11, a charming but unfathomable sprite who is called "Loco Poco." Shortly after arriving in Ephesus, Urie forms an intense friendship with an ignorant but brilliant local boy named Zebulon Walley, whose ego is diaphanous and who attaches himself to the Bishops like a starving kitten.

"The truth of a family is like the truth of an ocean, a series of movements in which themes occur and recur," the author writes. It seems particularly true of adolescence. Urie informs Zeb, an ardent believer, that there is no God, that Socrates was a better man than Jesus. When the young man recovers, they go on to other intellectual topics-something called "the Cult of Ugliness," then the "sexual power of puberty," and finally, of course, Krafft-Ebing. But their first kiss leads only to a more metaphysical discussion. Clearly such cerebral lovers have no future. For sex Urie turns to a much older naval officer, and the grieving Zeb is astonished to find himself aggressively seduced by Loco Poco, just 14.

Something Wrong. So it goes. There is a constant struggle for money and education. Natural outlaws, all the Bishop women steal when they feel they must. What with their improvised clothes and makeshift domestic solutions, they seem like Little Women turned inside out. In fact, the girls stage an amateur production of the novel in which Loco plays both Beth and Amy. She also plays both in her own life. Like Beth, she dies. Like Amy, she has a tantalizing streak of amorality.

Ephesus is over 400 pages long and contains no fewer than 55 chapters full of encounters, imbroglios, plots. Not all of them work, and occasionally the pace slackens. The author is vulnerable to charges of excess and lack of critical judgment. One may as well try to defend reality. The only rejoinder is how vivid and how much like life the book is. The late Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." This is a novel. . Martha Duffy

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