Desperate Characters

...Miss Howard tries hard to freshen her tired scene with an abundance of eccentric characters, whose outlines are cleverly suggested but whose substance is perilously vague, and whose place in the scheme of the novel is irritatingly fuzzy...

...It is all we need to know, for Miss Johnson has an uncanny gift for infusing an evocative intensity into the here and now...

...One feels consistently cheated by the "fine" writing, the artfulness of all those tentative ambiguities, the ornate fretwork of dissonance and dependence that registers so little thought and feeling about the ongoing war of American generations...

...Why, then, has the door to her apartment been vandalized as if it were an effigy of her flesh...

...At no point does Miss Howard take any chances, make the kind of reckless flying leap that Diane Johnson carries off with splendid bravura on practically every page...

...she is both a mother and a reputable liberal journalist, writing well-received books about capital punishment, women in politics and the like...

...in a supermarket checker she once insulted...

...Who would want to kill a woman who can think this way...

...Men hate to hear about this...

...Only one of the portraits acquires incisive clarity-Jimmy's mother, a disappointed and blowzy Irish beauty tied to a chronic gambler for drab life, tippling herself away in a squalid Bronx tenement with secret nips of gin and yearning...

...She is also convinced that someone is trying to murder her, though her best friend insists she is "inferring from the normal malignancy of things some flattering personal attention...

...You love them but you wish they would talk about something you are interested in...

...Why has the windshield of her car been smeared with vomit and all four tires slashed...

...While all of Miss Johnson's black characters are drawn with flawlessly unsentimental precision-her ear for their vitality, their anger and sadness, is more accurately tuned than that of many black writers-Osella is a malevolent masterpiece...

...Everyone else, including Laura and Jimmy, remains hazy and dim, though Miss Howard's prose is never less than elegant...

...Despite circumstances that are appallingly bleak and unlikely to improve in the near future, N. is too self-mocking to seriously indulge in the tiresome litanies of grievance and complaint that militancy inspires...

...her Brahmin father, a judge who defied stuffy convention once, and only once, by marrying a lower-class Irish girl from Brooklyn...

...227 pp., $6.95), we are told nothing whatever about the heroine's childhood and early youth, about her parents or their social and economic class, about her brothers and sisters or her favorite traumas...

...Yet in all the mounting horror of the week, with its incontrovertibly real violence and hatred, N.'s free-floating paranoia runs to keep pace...

...but mainly in the grotesquely fat Osella, her former maid, who one day went berserk and had to be thrown out of the house...

...The discomfiting ambivalences felt by mothers of small children have rarely been expressed with such witty clarity...

...Never dependent for her sharpness and depth upon a trailing mist of pseudopsychoanalytic generalizations about the past, N. Hexam is nonetheless a subtly complete, engaging woman...

...Indeed, she is refreshingly straightforward...

...Any faithful reader of current American fiction has been here before, time and again...

...When Ev dies a few days later, N. thinks she is next...

...Where treacherous reality ends and N.'s terrified fantasies take over is the unresolvable conundrum at the heart of this memorable book, and in the end the only tangible certainty is N.'s unique talent for surviving on her own terms, for defending the best of herself even when the enemy is only her own darkest imaginings...

...Who is the phantom caller crooning poisonous obscenities over the phone in the middle of each night...

...When they sleep too long you are in terror, too, that they have died...

...Neither does Miss Johnson's fine-honed irony spare the erratic white-liberal guilt of N., who "avoided buying Aunt Jemima products for fear [Osella] would resent that caricature of herself on the box, though I recognize that Osella probably saw nothing odd in Aunt Jemima at all, any more than I personally resent Betty Crocker...

...In panic, N. suspects her tormentor in everyone: in her ex-husband, a pompous and infantile lawyer with some chillingly bizarre impulses...

...She is too quirky and sardonic for slogans, yet also more recklessly self-committed than most feminists...

...Who was it that attacked her black baby-sitter and dear friend, Ev, in the basement laundry room of her apartment building...

...Nor are we given a dutiful sketch of that tiresome ancestral symbol in current fiction, the ail-powerfully influential grandparent...

...Certainly Miss Howard's stylistic virtuosity cannot be disputed...

...When they are sleeping, you are in terror that the precious silence will be ended by one of them waking...

...She is furious and sly, an expert at emotional blackmail whose every gesture was a taunting parody of the warmhearted black mammy until her madness erupted, destroying the obsequious mask of a Southern lifetime...

...Idiosyncratic, strikingly intelligent, unaggressively honest, she divulges her endearing nature in every word she utters as she gives her account of one harrowing recent week...

...Four children or not, she had taken her life (and theirs) in her hands, and discarded her awful husband, because "if you once admit that your life is wrong and you know why and still fail to change it, then you are doomed forever...

...I for instance am interested in transformational grammar...

...Far from being the masterpiece Frank Kermode proclaims it to be, Before My Time is merely an exquisite bore...

...Before My Time, alas, is impaled on its very perfection...

...Miss Johnson, astonishingly for a woman writer in 1974, has not been seduced by fashionably bitter feminist ideology...

...Things could scarcely be worse for N. She is a 29-year-old divorcee with four very young children, scraping along in a loathsome Sacramento housing development on mingy child-support, and not only taxed by the effort to earn a degree in linguistics but besotted with love for an incurably married man...

...At 40, Laura Quinn thinks herself contentedly married to a successful Boston lawyer...

...she carried it off with panache, but achingly aware of the vanished comforts of deception when a marriage dies and "the air smells of madness and ill nature...

...N. Hexam has more than her share of contradiction: She is at once mettlesome and desperate, courageous and terrified to the marrow, persecuted and uncontrollably paranoid...

...her safe liberal assurance, which cocky Jimmy relentlessly needles and tears to shreds...

...The fine British critic Frank Kermode waves a glittering banner of praise on the jacket of Maureen Howard's Before My Time (Little, Brown, 241 pp., $6.95), calling it not only distinguished but a masterpiece...

...In fact, we do not even learn the narrator's first name-she is only N. Hexam throughout...

...Yet from the first, the principal thread of her narrative is yawningly familiar: still another invasion of middle-aged suburban order by rude youth...

...every inch of her prose is trimmed and polished with meticulous skill...

...in the end there is almost nothing to grasp and hold and savor...

...With her fourth novel (she has also written Lesser Lives, a charming biography of Meredith's first wife) Diane Johnson becomes one of the genuinely arresting voices in American writing today...

...You sit in parks for hours and hours...

...But when Jimmy Cogan, her cousin Millie's teen-age son, comes to spend the summer, things predictably begin to fall apart, and Laura is forced to reassess her opinions about her brilliant brother, killed in the Korean War...

...Yet I can think of few characters in recent fiction whose being is more lucidly concrete and intricately alive, more compelling and distinct...

...This may sound notional and absurdly romantic, but N. was not irresponsible...

...I scarcely mean to suggest that the histories of all fictional characters are dispensable-only that the dredging and burrowing in early life that so many novelists resort to for their hackneyed profundities about adult motives and behavior are too mechanical to yield persuasive connections, too formularized and superficial to suggest convincing revelations about personal destiny, or about cause and effect in human experience...

...Miss Johnson, in any case, insists that her heroine simply stand up and be-in the discontinuous, remorseless present and the immediate mess of her life, never looking back nostalgically to vanished years for excuses and explanations...