The Trouble of One House

THE COBWEB (369 pp.)--William Gibson--Knopf ($3.95).

The publishers of The Cobweb have sent it into the world with a stout advertising and promotion budget and the advance assurance to bookdealers that it is "an absorbing, down-to-earth novel about real people responding to the real stuff of everyday human experience." The book may sell well, at that. A first novel by Massachusetts' William Gibson, it sticks to the oldest rule in soap opera: it gets its characters in trouble and keeps them there.

A good deal of the trouble in The Cobweb is readymade, since the setting is a Midwest psychiatric sanitarium called the Castle House Clinic for Nervous Disorders. But Head Psychoanalyst Stewart McIver, his wife and his staff spin some extra strands of personal disaster that make the patients seem sane and well adjusted.

Stewart McIver is fortyish and lean, with grey, close-cropped hair, "a lincolnesque man." and he has a throbbing devotion to his job. In jostling harness with a handsome lush named Devereaux, who is the official director of the sanitarium, McIver runs Castle House on a progressive principle, i.e., that patients must have responsibility if they are to show any. He finds it harder to apply this principle in his private life. At 39, his wife Karen is as fresh, and as false, as counterfeit money. A blonde china-doll type, she nurses a badly nicked ego because McIver has been sleeping in a separate room for eight months. His two children are bright as toothpaste ads, but busy Dr. McIver barely knows them.

The apple of McIver's parental eye is Stevie Holt, a melancholy young painter patient with one suicide attempt behind him. The curing of Stevie is also a pet project of a thirtyish war widow on McIver's staff who sees eye to eye with him on therapeutic methods. Together with the "patients' governing committee," McIver and the widow concoct a plan for Stevie to design new draperies for the sanitarium living room. Unknown to McIver, both Karen and the sanitarium's old biddy of a business manager have ordered separate sets of draperies on their own.

By the time the battle of the draperies is fought to a climax, Castle House is rocked to its foundations. Mclver climbs into bed with the widow, Karen does some lipstick-smudging with Devereaux, and Stevie nearly commits suicide all over again. At novel's end, Mclver is in full command of Castle House--but not much else.

Though it sometimes slows to a lecture-room pace, The Cobweb shows a nice ear for the spoken word and a good eye for the physical props of upper-middle-class life. Even its mixed-up characters might be fun to be with, if each did not so persistently regard his own navel as the hub of the universe.

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