Passages

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE WOODS by David Plante Atheneum; 123 pages; $8.95

Growing up is learning to hop from the self, the family and the world without getting wet feet. In David Plante's two previous novels of the Francoeur family, these slippery steppingstones have protruded from still, deep waters. The Family, nominated for a National Book Award in 1979, introduced the French-Canadian clan at home in Providence. Papa was a machinist, and his wife, mother of seven sons, a closet hysteric. Son Daniel, then an adolescent, proved to be a precocious observer and subtle dramatist of domestic conflict. In The Country (1981), Daniel was, like Providence-born Plante, a writer living in London. In 159 pages, that novel conveyed a surprising amount of what there is to know and feel about aging parents and brotherly attachments.

The Woods backs up a few years. Daniel finishes his freshman year at a Boston college, spends the summer at his family's vacation house and returns to school. Few periods are as difficult to pin down as that brief limbo between the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood. The mysteries of the physical and the spiritual, the image and the imagination are fresh and beckoning.

There are the expected encounters: a woman who finds the youth's awkward innocence sexually and emotionally attractive; the summer job that does not work out. For a few bewildering hours Daniel parades up and down a street dressed as a giant peanut, his view limited by a slit in an oversized bow tie. The papier-mache prison foreshadows future confinements, but it is also a rude distortion of a young body striving to know itself. At one point the young man stands naked before a mirror and attempts to sketch his reflection. But "he found it very difficult to draw himself without drawing in the paper and pencil too." The result is a picture of his body drawing his body.

Religion, which had a strong symbolic part in The Family, is now distant and depressing. Mr. and Mrs. Francoeur, devout Roman Catholics, are seen intermittently flitting through their woods like shades in Dante's Purgatorio, while Daniel tussles with sexuality, unspecified rage and moral salvation. Should he refuse to register for the draft or sign up as a conscientious objector? The question threatens to overburden a small, finely balanced novel of physical awakening. But the risks pay off in an unexpected dimension. Daniel's brother Albert, a Marine Corps officer, offers advice that goes beyond the usual gung-ho justifications. "Your private longing may be to live," he writes, "but that counts for nothing. You cannot escape the world and its public longing . . . You must bear the world. I do. I bear it less well in peace than in war, because I know that we destroy ourselves more in peace than in war, and in war you are allowed to hate."

This is something that the young must learn to accept or refute on their own. Other people's hatreds can be more stifling than a peanut suit. Readers of Plante's other novels know that Daniel becomes an expatriate writer like the author. To the extent that this suggests autobiography, the image of Daniel drawing himself drawing himself is a special effect, a quiet counterpoint to popular entertainments like TRON in which characters noisily inhabit their electronic fictions. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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