Illuminations and Reflections

By R.Z. Sheppard

PITCH DARK by Renata Adler; Knopf; 144 pages; $12.95

Renata Adler has a way with commas:

"They seem to have no worry whether I can safely drive at all, let alone find my way home, home, in the dark, having drunk as much as this .. . The passport, I had noticed, was growing smaller, over the years, and changing fabric ... A case nominally begins with an injury, for which there exists in the law a kind of remedy, usually financial, but sometimes having to do, rather more brutally, with divorce, separation, incarceration, custody."

This sort of thing is catching: Adler's punctuation defines, enhances and, above all, charms, in the old, musical, intransitive form of the verb. As a journalist and novelist, she has sought a coherent melody in the dissonances and sprung rhythms of her times. Her collection of essays Toward a Radical Middle (1970) presented a critical intelligence unde-flected by the push and bombast of public events. At a noisy period in the country's history, Adler firmly registered the difficulty, high cost and fragility of progress, or, as she put it, "how much has been gained, how far there is to go, and what there is to lose."

In fiction, she proved something of a middling radical. Speedboat (1976) blurred traditional narrative and character development with the authority of a French antinovel. But the book avoided the rigid aesthetic of a Robbe-Grillet with choice bits of old-fashioned storytelling. Anecdotes, conversations and apergus were presented as a highly refined traffic din emanating from cultural Manhattan. The selected fragments added up to a lasting impression of an oddly provincial city of small talk in narrow brownstones and desperate solipsisms on the even narrower couches of psychotherapists.

Pitch Dark is a novel with a broader itinerary, different shadowy characters but the same cosmopolitan, distanced voice. It belongs, of course, to Adler herself, a former student at some of the world's leading universities, including the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale Law School, and, at 45, an astute observer and listener based at The New Yorker. Like Speedboat, the new book is an artful arrangement of discontinuous parts. Its narrator exemplifies the fugitive detachment nurtured by young intellectuals in the 1950s. Her name is Kate Ennis, though her identity is never as clear as her prose. At one point, Ennis, or someone who sounds like her, appears to be carrying a passport issued to Adler.

Kate is an enviable model of today's mature New York woman. True, her long affair with a married man is coming to an end, but she appears to have the money and job flexibility to travel freely and maintain a house in the country as well as an apartment in Manhattan. Her friends include diplomats, politicians, poets and distinguished professionals, with such names as Leander Dworkin and Ezra Paris.

Kate's lover is just plain Jake. It is to him that much of Pitch Dark is addressed. The theme of exasperating love, of life with half a loaf, is a constant that puts the narrator's more transitory emotions in humorous perspective. Among them is a case of heebie-jeebies brought on by a side trip to Ireland. In a set piece that could be mistaken for a parody of Hitchcock, Kate makes her way in a balky rental car to a coastal castle.

The owner graciously allows her to use the place in his absence, though the household staff apparently does not approve. They are evasive, rude and sometimes just country queer:

"Paddy, could you tell me the best place to go for a walk. How long a walk were you thinking of ? he says. I say, About an hour, and add that I don't have much sense of direction.

In some detail, then, he describes a walk. I ask where I would go if I wanted a two-hour walk. In reply, he describes what I realize is the exact same walk."

The unwelcome guest adds a comic touch of paranoia. Guilty of having peeled the leasing sticker from her car, she fears that the Irish police will not let her leave the country.

"This is the age of crime," Kate notes, concluding, "I think the truth is this, over a period of days and nights some weeks ago, I became part of it."

The principle of universal complicity is not always to be taken seriously; feeling guilty does not necessarily make one so. Adler is unusually skilled at making careful distinctions and refreshing subjects that have grown dull with familiarity. She can imaginatively argue that constitutional law is based on precepts of storytelling and find probable cause for adultery in the legend of Penelope, Ulysses' wife and a classic symbol of fidelity.

Kate, a reflection of the author's sensibility and probably much more, confronts a variety of subjects and surprises encountered in her mobile, solitary life: the sense of helplessness that descends when fighting with the phone company; the awkwardness connected with buying a gun; reading somebody's meaningless leftover notes in a rented memory typewriter; going to a Chinese hypnotist for writer's block; discovering why "deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power." By the flares of such insights, one finds the way through Pitch Dark, a wise and beautifully shaped book.

Excerpt

"The clerk put the gun, in its box, in a white paper bag, the flat, white paper bag stationery stores use.

I have put the white paper bag, with the box and the gun in it, into a closet. And though there is no ammunition, it seems to me to lie there, ticking. I mean, I know I ought to throw it out. Or not worry about it, after all, everybody has them. And cars are dangerous, germs are dangerous ... So I'm not a coward or a hypochondriac so much, with respect anyway to risks of certain orders. I've taken on a bully or two, in my professional capacity, and on occasions of another sort risked my physical self. But this buying of a gun, this simple, in some ways quotidian purchase, is the most extreme, the worst, most extremest, I can't find the word for it, thing I've ever done."

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.