Wanderings

By Stefan Kanfer

AT THE BORDER by Robert Hemenway Atheneum; 240 pages; $14.95

Some pigeons refuse to be holed. Is this polished, melancholy work a novel?

Or is it simply a group of stories sharing a common protagonist? Is its leading man, John Everett, a modern knight errant sacrificing himself to obsolete notions of romantic love? Or is he merely a maundering hick, caroming off women who easily recognize the traits of a user? Is his creator, Robert Hemenway, an artist of light-meter sensitivity? Or is he simply a construction worker employing the worn materials of bromides and reveries?

Because all these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Hemenway, 62, provides one of the most difficult cases in modern American writing. The author's talent is unquestionable. His first collection showed fluency and wit; its title story, The Girl Who Sang with the Beatles, won the O. Henry Award in 1970. At the Border is Hemenway's first published work since that impressive debut.

As before, the author concentrates memory and feelings into a small space: "He had once heard Paul Tillich lecture at Chicago, and when he spoke of the void, bringing the word up from deep inside his body, you could feel it, feel the emptiness and the terror of the emptiness." That terror stalks Everett through seven separate phases, from early childhood to late middle age. After his mother's death in childbirth, young John is raised by maternal grandparents in Michigan. The introverted boy derives his notion of love from medieval romances, and the real world seems a strange, indecipherable place. It will always remain that way. At college, philosophies and theories present themselves, but Everett prefers tangible things: "I can tell you what I do want to do when our discussions get really abstract. Go out on the Midway and roll on the grass."

When he exchanges the abstract of the classroom for the concrete of Manhattan, enlightenment is not involved in the trade. Everett's career as an editor is static; an early marriage dissolves in diffidence, and his wife and young daughter move on. Happiness, Everett concludes, is like one of those ideas at the university: too difficult to grasp, and therefore best evaded. In the end, after another failed marriage and numerous unsatisfying affairs, the compulsive wanderer is still at the border, both of feeling and of countries, as he sojourns in Europe. "Why go home?" he wonders. "Why go back to

America? . . . He had no obligations any longer--not really . . . not to his daughter, not to his job. He would go to Vienna."

When At the Border does not sound like a Billy Joel song, it displays authenticity and poignance. At his best, Hemenway has a sure sense of urban life and involvements, of apartments so tiny that even ideas have to enter single file; of affairs that begin and end on chance remarks; of yearnings for culture buried deep within the city's most anonymous dwellers. But these virtues are nearly undone by relentless mannerisms. Whenever Everett reaches an impasse, he conveniently has a dream, recollected in detail that Freud would admire. Attempts at plain speaking frequently result in a piling on of cliches: Everett knows an object "like the back of his hand"; women have "impenetrable" eyes. Exclamation points detonate with the flatness of dropped light bulbs: "How warm the air was!"; "How his father talked!"

Perhaps all this was inevitable: those existential props, the Man Between and the Border, need a fresher approach than laconic narrative, no matter how charged with significance. Hemenway's best passages remain celebrations of the ordinary: meals, lovemaking, conversations with friends. For him, as for so many contemporary American writers, home is where the art is. --By Stefan Kanfer