Ars Moriendi

By Timothy Foote

THE HOTHOUSE BYTHE EAST RIVER by MURIEL SPARK 134 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Muriel Spark has posed in a fetching peignoir with a sinister black cat draped over her shoulder. In her prose, too, she has mostly worn her rue with a deference to the reader's need to take his shots of cold mortality with a little sweet vermouth. Lately, however, the author has grown more flatly somber, shorter on style, wit and patience, like a lonely spinster who has become too preoccupied, too saddened by the world to go through the reassuring motions of genial small talk.

The Driver's Seat (1970) followed a girl who buys some outlandish clothes and heads south to find a man who will stab her to death. Not to Disturb (1972) thinly describes a programmed murder-suicide contrived by scheming servants in a microcosmic Geneva chateau that may be the modern world. Now, in a long-awaited book set in Manhattan, where Miss Spark lived in 1966-67, she plonks down a set of characters who are already dead.

Conveniently, they move around the Upper East Side in the decadent present, amply provided with cash, overheated apartments, mouthy analysts, slack children and enraged servants. But most of them have been killed by a buzz bomb in London in 1944, and they exist, haunted by old loves, fears and hates. Until we learn that they are ghosts, it is assumed that they are merely mad--especially Elsa. She is sure that a shoe salesman in a Madison Avenue shop is really an SS man named Kiel, long defunct, with whom she had a brief liaison during the war at a British intelligence installation. Elsa's shadow falls the wrong way--always a bad sign--and she practices the kind of unpredictable tyranny that only a weak, formerly beautiful, unbalanced woman can. Elsa's husband Paul has an inner voice that keeps crying. "Help me! Help me!"

So does the reader. "Literature of sentiment and emotion," Muriel Spark recently predicted, "must go. It cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society." In its place she then proposed an art of "satire and ridicule." Hothouse, presumably, is an example. But precisely because it is lifeless, few people will worry about whatever the book is trying to say. Various possibilities exist. Time past is time present. Late, rich middle age, especially in Manhattan, is a kind of death in life --sterile, futile, hopelessly preoccupied with the past, most depressingly so when earlier years have been marked by great drama or endeavor. But the book often reads like some sort of cabalistic fiction that only an adept could decipher.

Even Muriel Spark's set-piece satire is only sporadically rich enough to stir interest, most visibly at a production of Peter Pan staged by Elsa and Paul's homosexual son, in which all the parts are played by people over 60. "It's sick!" members of the audience shout. A collective American voice replies, "Sick is real! Sick is interesting!" Not all that interesting, though. It is far easier in fiction than in life to distinguish the quick from the dead.

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