Goodbye, Nora Jane

Nora Jane: A Life in Stories
By Ellen Gilchrist
Back Bay, 420 pp., paperback, $14.95

The world is magic, says a character in Ellen Gilchrist's new book. According to the author's luminous vision, it truly is.

''Nora Jane" brings together the Nora Jane narratives from six previous collections and adds a fresh novella, ''Fault Lines," which provides a satisfying coda to the chronicle of lives readers have followed faithfully through decades of Gilchrist's work.

We meet Nora Jane as the scrappy 14-year-old daughter of a dead Vietnam vet and an alcoholic mother in New Orleans, where she suffers her beloved grandmother's death and five years later robs a bar for enough money to follow her boyfriend to San Jose. But when she gets there Sandy is nowhere to be found, and her attempt to rob a bookstore owner for some starting-out money engenders one of the great romances of contemporary fiction.

Freddy Harwood allows Nora Jane to steal his heart instead of his coffers, and he commits himself to a lifetime of worshiping the beautiful, black-haired, self-described anarchist who at first prefers the shiftless Sandy to Freddy, the T. S. Eliot-quoting Sears Roebuck heir. When she becomes pregnant she is not sure which of the two men is responsible. But Freddy wins her over and becomes father to twins Lydia and Tammili, and the family lives amid much love and luxury in a mansion riding a major earthquake fault in Berkeley, Calif.

It's hard to do justice here to all that Gilchrist accomplishes in this volume, as she uses the entire canvas of the book to depict multiple psychic and spiritual vistas. Though the early stories are told from Nora Jane's perspective, subsequently we move around to inhabit the hearts and heads of other people connected to her life -- some of whom Nora Jane herself has never even met. For example, in ''Götterdämmerung" we are introduced to a Middle Eastern religious sect leader who has put a hit out on Freddy, among other book-related professionals, ''as part of the cleansing that surrounded the Salman Rushdie shame." ''He needed no praise for his work," Gilchrist tells us about Abu Saad. ''He was his own praise. He thought of his father in heaven thinking of him and his begetting and he was glad."

But most of the stories focus on Nora Jane's extended family, which includes Nieman Gluuk, Freddy's best friend, who in the profoundly moving ''You Must Change Your Life" quits his identity as a locally famous movie critic to study biochemistry. The switch is a cosmic imperative, Nieman decides. ''The maker of this bed and the ax that felled the trees that made the boards we hammered and Jonas Salk and murderers and thieves and Akira Kurosawa and I are one," he muses, as he falls off to sleep. ''This great final truth, which all visionaries have intuited, which must be learned over and over again, world without end, amen."

Nieman's epiphany is accompanied by a visit from no less than Leonardo da Vinci, and it is to Gilchrist's credit that she pulls this off in a book that otherwise remains tethered to our time and space. Leonardo -- who accepts Nieman's offer to show him the high-powered microscopes at the Berkeley campus -- leaves behind a cape to be discovered later by Nora Jane's daughters, who take it to be a talisman.

After Tammili and Lydia experience its magic, the cape ''would end up at the city laundry. Then on the bed of a seven-year-old Mexican girl who had been taken from her mother. But that is another story," Gilchrist writes, and some pages later we meet that Mexican child because she is the foster daughter of the cousin of the woman who is about to marry Nieman. Gilchrist keeps widening the world for us in this way, drawing connections that are sometimes known only to the reader. We become -- rather than mere observers -- intimate witnesses to multiple lives.

Through it all is the unifying figure of Nora Jane, who is blessed with a ''miraculous" singing voice and who was ''the despair of the sisters at the Academy of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus because she would never use her voice for the glory of God." She keeps her voice quiet except in a crisis -- when she is stranded on a collapsing bridge and belts out show tunes and Walt Disney songs for frightened children in a neighboring car -- until she has the chance to sing for a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Though we don't get to read about her performance (perhaps the only missing story in the book), we know that it is Nora Jane's tribute to her dead grandmother, who raised her to become the strong survivor she is today.

Gilchrist, who won the National Book Award in 1984 for ''Victory Over Japan," is a master at allowing details to unfold from one story to another, expertly weaving narrative threads until the tapestry of Nora Jane's life is complete. Gilchrist's is a world in which science, history, and Gatorade combine with mysticism, terrorism, and PowerBars to create a tour de force that allows for realities on different planes of existence: the Oklahoma bombing, twins whispering to each other in the womb. As one character notes, ''The conscious mind is the size of a screw in the door frame of the mansion of the unconscious." In ''Nora Jane," we are Gilchrist's confidants on a glorious journey of the collective soul.

Jessica Treadway is the author of ''Absent Without Leave" and ''And Give You Peace." She is an associate professor of creative writing at Emerson College.