The Diary of a Mad Widow

By R.Z. Sheppard

LIVING IN THE MANIOTOTO by Janet Frame; Braziller; 240 pages; $8.95

One of the many strange and illuminating episodes in Janet Frame's tenth novel concerns an Englishman's experiment with truth-seeking in the desert. He chooses a simmering patch of wasteland east of Berkeley, Calif., and in a few hours discovers that his dry run is the real thing. As he waits under a road sign for his wife to return, a jackrabbit bounds into his shadow to cool off. This is followed by three rapid epiphanies. First, that his life was a gift to himself and others and that even his share of sunlight and shadow did not belong to him alone. Second, that "he was not trapped into surviving by the currency of the acceptably real." Third, that he could die then and there, "Bred to a harder thing/ than Triumph . . . / be secret and exult,/ Because of all things known/ that is most difficult."

Captives of Janet Frame's previous fictional spells will appreciate just how difficult, for the line between secret exultation and madness is typing-paper thin. Frame knows both sides of the line: as a voluntary mental patient in her native New Zealand and an artist whose originality and stunning gifts have secured a small loyal audience. An antipodean J.D. Salinger, she avoids interviews, and has even been known to flee a face-to-face meeting with her own publisher. In ad dition she has the odd distinction of having written under her real name while living as Janet Clutha, a name taken from New Zealand's Clutha River.

Her art shows little shyness. It boldly confronts the isolation and private logic of madness, and shows how aberration, anguish and longing can be turned into lucid fiction. Beyond this, Frame has a satiric grasp of the absurdities that pass for normal. Intensive Care (1970), for example, is about a future welfare tyranny in New Zealand where tranquilizers are put in the water supply, and all the grass and trees are plastic. Visions of brave new worlds are many, but Frame makes them newer with a brew of personal lyricism, broad cultural allusion and sudden chills.

Living in the Maniototo deals with the past and what the author cryptically labels the "Present Historic." It is a tense that allows hallucination to mingle with reality. A man is attacked by a detergent: "There was a flash of light, a smell of laundry and the penetrating fumes of a powerful cleanser, then a neutral nothing-smell, not even the usual substituted forest glade or field of lavender or carnation, and all that remained of Tommy were two faded footprints on the floor."

The Maniototo is not necessarily plain in New Zealand's centeral Otago; the region may exist only in the wonderfully deranged mind of novel's narrator, herself a chimera of identities. She is, at various stages, Violet Pansy Proudlock, a ventriloquist: Mavis Barwell, widow of a French teacher turned debt collector; and Alice Thumb, a novelist.

The far-flung settings of the book are straightforward. A suburb of Auckland, N.Z., is dominated by a North American-style shopping mall called Heaven-field--"a huge windowless pretence, as much an insinuation of Elsewhere as its own name or that of the city or the restaurant, Manhattan, as its entrance." Baltimore, Md., death place of Edgar Allan Poe, is recognizable, with its gray asphalt, red brick and black iron gratings, as are the affluent hills of Berkeley. "passing through a 'wilderness' phase where it was fashionable to let meadow grass and herbs grow as they pleased, and the wild creatures come and go in the gardens and on the hillside roads."

There, in the guise of Novelist Alice Thumb, the narrator accepts an invitation from an elderly couple to use their vacation in Italy. Her writer's eye quickly perceives that the dwelling's modern angularities serve no other function than a change from the traditional. Its furnishings are a collection of expensive replicas; the library is a random reflection of the chic. One volume is titled A Lifetime Reading Plan.

Suddenly it all belongs to Alice. A lawyer calls to say that her hosts have been killed in an Italian earthquake and that she is their sole heir. She is also advised that the departed had invited four others to use the house, and that it would be kind if Alice let them come. When they arrive, she becomes distracted from her work in progress and writes instead about her guests: the British desert lover, described as an "experiential snob," because he thinks that his search for God makes him superior to his wife who quests only for a better Parmesan cheese; a 60-year-old soil erosion specialist who fancies himself the savior of other people's lives and careers; and his young, adoring hungarian wife.

Readers of Frame's Scented Gardens for the Blind and Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room will be prepared for the unexpected. Literary aestheticians can ponder the author's ideas on replica and originals. Structural purists may find her infusions of poetry unwiedly and unnecessary. Frame herself simply calls the book an entertainment. It is that and more, for she proves to be not only spinner of bizarre and hunting fantasy but a sharp social observer as well. Her descriptions of New Zealand suburbanization, of California as public confessional booth, of television and religious fakers convey a reality as urgent as Alice Thumb's creativeschizophrenia. --R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"You will say that such a dream is arrogant, ambitious, unoriginal, and of course it is ... I too will write a book. Another book. I know that our age has been propelled, blackmailed into becoming the Age of Explanation. I feel that literate people have almost explained themselves away. I use the word 'literate' as a fact, not a judgment. At first, you remember, Alice Thumb, it was our anxiety, our unease which was explained away, but in the process, we ourselves have been disappearing. The efficiency of our explanations is like that of the insecticide which reduces the insect to a crumbling shell.

Yet here I am, even now, explaining, here we are telling our story, there is no end to it in the literate world, explaining and telling, propagating and admiring the tongue blossom, day by day uttering speech and night unto night showing knowledge.

Then why is each of us so diminished by the resulting fruit of this tongue blossom?"

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