Savlng Grace

By Mayo Mohs

THE WORLD IS MADE OF GLASS

by Morris West Morrow; 322 pages; $15.95

Roman Catholic novelists have done well with the idea that the path to grace is crowded with sinners. The latest novel from Morris West (The Devil's Advocate, The Shoes of the Fisherman) follows that formula: long periods of decadence punctuated by brief moments of salvation. The priestly figure preoccupied with sin in this case is a psychiatrist, and no ordinary one. He is the great Carl Gustav Jung, faced with a fearsome opponent who confounds even him.

The patient is Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld, physician and horse breeder, a rich and beautiful woman who prowls Europe seeking pleasure. As the novel opens on the eve of World War I, she is being courted by an international arms merchant who wants her to preside over an elite whorehouse, where the commerce of war and sex might yield both profit and information. Magda hesitates; her considerable self-possession is ready to shatter. A doctor friend sends her to Jung in Switzerland.

Thereafter the book becomes a dialogue between Magda and the analyst, who is going through his own variety of breakdown. Jung's troubled dreams seem safely wrapped in the odd domesticity of his Swiss menage `a trois, with his wife and mistress in truce under the same roof. But Magda's nightmarish deeds have brought her to the brink of suicide. What crimes lie at the heart of her anxiety? Why did she give up the practice of medicine?

The course of the analysis is a convenient device to lead Magda through her biography and Jung through his. Her story, poured out in elegantly turned phrases, dominates the book, revealing a childhood poisoned by a father who taught her to believe in nothing and indulge in everything. Her brief marriage begins and ends in murder; her sexual adventures are power plays.

Beneath it all Jung discerns what Magda needs. "She expects too much," he writes in his notes. "She demands a God I can't reveal to her, an absolution she hasn't earned and probably never will." Her friend the referring physician finally writes the saving prescription: running the medical service at a halfway house for former prostitutes. But the author kisses off this denouement in a scant few pages, barely hinting at the thoughts and feelings of the new Magda. Having built the novel on the spectacle of her corruption, West might have reflected a bit more on the drama of her return to grace.

--By Mayo Mohs This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.