OUT OF IOWA

IN DOUGLAS BAUER'S NOVEL, THE HEARTLAND OF 1957 IS PEOPLED IN PART BY LOST SOULS

Author: By Mark Shechner

Date: SUNDAY, September 21, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

In Douglas Bauer's ``The Book of Famous Iowans,'' the grief and anger are those of Lewis and Leanne Vaughn, after Leanne has taken up with the pitcher on the town's baseball team, Bobby Markum, and is preparing to walk out of family life for good. The novel is Leanne's story, though it is told to us by her son Will, as he remembers that summer, his 12th, when he was the batboy for the baseball team and his mother was the woman nervously smoking cigarettes high up in the bleachers.

Since domestic pathos is virtually the main line of rural realism nowadays, and we know from the first page that things will go badly in the Vaughn household, how does Bauer make the shopworn and predictable seem fresh? His strategy is to keep the camera's eye riveted upon the family, in cruel and obstinate closeup, and to develop the action in almost ceremonial slow motion. Though the story is narrated retrospectively by an adult Will Vaughn, a journalist who is on his own second marriage, the prevailing sensibilities are the tender, overwrought ones of a child, who cannot see beyond the crumbling foundations of his own childhood.

In this town of 800 people -- 800 souls, as the local Dutch might say -- we meet, besides scattered walk-ons, only five: Will, Leanne, Lewis, his mother, Dorothy Vaughn, and Bobby Markum. Dorothy is a recluse who occupies her days with a scrapbook devoted to the lives of such famous Iowans as Mamie Eisenhower, actress Jean Seberg, and wrestler Vern Gagne. Candid and outlandish in her speech, she is one of New Holland's spiritual misfits, though her earthy, undeluded voice is the perspective Will needs on the town's insular theocracy. If this book is a Greek tragedy, Dorothy is the Sophoclean chorus.

Leanne is even more the misfit. Daughter of a miner from Leadville, Colo., the hard-drinking Lean Dean McQueen, and as beautiful as a fashion model, she met Lewis Vaughn at the end of World War II in Cheyenne, Wyo., where he was an Air Force mechanic on B-17s and she was a lounge singer, ``a seventeen- year-old girl with a strong alto voice and a glibness of delivery studiously modeled after that of Dinah Shore.'' Lewis, who had never seen anything like her back home, courted her strenuously, married her at Cheyenne City Hall after she became pregnant, and brought her back to New Holland after his father died in a tractor accident. It was a sure-fire mismarriage, as Lewis quickly retreated to his tractor and Leanne cultivated her moods, her frustrated desires, her field of dreams. A theatrical, romantic, self-absorbed woman, ``her moods were the climate I lived in,'' recalls Will.

Will himself is dreamy after the manner of his mother, practicing his pitching delivery in the henhouse with fresh eggs and hosting an elaborate ``Will Vaughn Variety Show'' in his private mental theater. He and his mother both bring a free exuberance to the feeding of fantasies, and one can't help but feel that the mother's breakaway is an opening shot in the culture war that will later be known as the '60s. That cultural considerations are seldom raised in the book is its method: a relentless indwelling that takes little note of the surrounding life. But it is also a weakness, rendering us hostage to the zoom lens and its grainy, airless close-ups of human sweat and cigarette smoke, of panic, confusion, and doubt.

With the affair moving toward climax, confusion takes over, and the story grows random because life itself does. Will takes off one day with Bobby Markum, at the mother's urging, for the wrestling matches in Des Moines; they never make it because of car trouble. During a baseball game, Lewis Vaughn charges the mound from the stands, uncertain of what he will do when he gets there. When Leanne first disappears, Lewis combs the county in his truck, in what comes to be called ``the midnight ride of Lewis Vaughn,'' unable to find the wife who is hiding out in the farmhouse next door. Bobby Markum is as lost as anyone, a refugee from small-town Missouri with a major-league curveball and a bush-league future. Each is, in his own way, lost without the anchor of custom: the tractor, the kitchen, the mound, the henhouse. Only Dorothy, with her scrapbook of famous Iowans, which turns out to be her own reformed church, keeps her bearings. The Dutch, she says, ``act like God is . . . the truant officer,'' and she prefers the household gods of Mamie Eisenhower, Jean Seberg, and Vern Gagne, who are earthbound, vulnerable, and generous with forgiveness.

Douglas Bauer leaves a lot of threads dangling at the end. We never do know if Leanne has run off or if Lewis has killed her, so extreme are his rage and humiliation and so final is her disappearance. And if she has run off, we can't know if it is to the lounges of Cheyenne or the bistros of North Beach. By 1957, of course, the Dinah Shore imitation would have been horribly retro, but there was still time to go misty with June Christy and plug into a new collective dream life that left Iowa, church, and motherhood far behind.