Lurid Whirlpool

BLOOD ON THE DOVES by Maude Hutchins. 176 pages. Morrow. $3.95.

Willie is mad, and in this eerily brilliant little novel the reader is invited to dive down and down into the lurid whirlpool of his aberration and there circle with the weird debris of Willie until he knows in every bone of his being how it feels to be insane.

"Willie heard the girl moving around inside the room. The keyhole darkened as she went past it and lightened again and darkened and lightened. She had on a short black skirt and a blouse open between her breasts. Her toenails were scarlet. There was blood on the doves, bright-red blood and a gentle look of surprise in their round eyes. Willie felt faint. His hand grasped the knife in his jeans. Willie split the trouts' bellies with his knife, washed them in the cold water of the brook, and wiped the blood off his knife with a skunk-cabbage leaf. She had red hair and her blouse was open between her breasts. The train was going through the tunnel and it made a glumph sound as it went in and the wail of the whistle came out way back there, whoo whoo whoooooo. He heard the man fit the key in the lock and go inside very softly as if he were ashamed. Adele, he pleaded, just once. Willie took the knife out of his jeans. You disgust me, said Adele. Willie tied her wrists to the top bars of the iron bed and lifted her skirt. He felt faint. He glanced at the watch the teacher gave him. Right on time, Willie split Adele's pale belly open from the navel through the vulva. Whoo whooo whoooo--ahh!"

As an empathetic exercise, Blood on the Doves is profoundly frightening and enlightening; as a literary experiment, it is even more remarkable--a triumphant attempt to develop a surreal subject in a cubistic style. The previous novels (Victorine, Honey on the Moon) of Author Maude Hutchins, former wife of former Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, have established her reputation as a richly ironical imagist. Here, however, she has performed the impossible: she has transformed accurate psychiatry into living literature.

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