DEVIL OF THE HOUSE

Author: By Kathryn Harrison

Date: SUNDAY, February 1, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

The creation of coherent, cause-and-effect story from the randomness of experience is an essential human quality; a vision that transforms chaos to meaning makes life bearable. Even those who don't appreciate written forms are addicted to narrative, without which existence degenerates into the kind of hell conceived by Davis, one in which details accrue and accrue, threatening a significance that is never allowed to materialize.

The three households revealed are those of a 1950s Philadelphia family; a dollhouse belonging to the daughter of that family who, despite disorienting shifts in point of view and despite the book's promise to ``defy'' conventional storytelling, serves as the novel's narrator; and Moss cottage, the home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century Heloise who writes treatises on cooking and housekeeping. The homes are eerily interchangeable, accounts of one segueing seamlessly into another, their occupants equally reducible to an emblematic set of mother, father, and child, all as featureless as the stiff figures posed among tiny dollhouse furnishings. To follow this equation of houses to its conclusion is to suspect that whatever god might exist governs human destinies with a capriciousness equal to that of a child manipulating toys. Allusions to ``Little Women,'' ``The Little Lame Prince,'' ``Wuthering Heights,'' ``The Secret Garden,'' ``The Little Match Girl,'' and ``Charlotte's Web,'' among other staples of the young girl's bookshelf, underscore our sense of an immature intelligence trying to interpret a malignant grown-up world, one in which destiny lacks meaning, and free will is no more than a conceit.

The Mother in ``Hell'' is a homemaker, bound to domestic responsibilities that she fulfills even as they deny her the possibility of a greater life. Father is the breadwinner chafing under his burden and tempted into adulterous flight. Daughter is bookish, neurasthenic, afflicted with either anorexia or tuberculosis, the two diseases (province of the sensitive, the feminine) made equivalent in that it is Edwina Moss's 19th-century daughter who starves herself even as the 20th-century daughter is hospitalized for an anachronistic case of consumption, the very idea of which dovetails with the book's obsessive focus on food, the labored preparation of meals, and their curious inability to provide pleasure.

Edwina Moss, without benefit of refrigerator or range, raises cookery to art and science; the narrator's 1950s mother, enslaved to modern appliances, sullenly produces unappetizing dinners, repeatedly burning them and filling the house with smoke, depending on alcohol to anesthetize herself against the stultifying boredom of her life. The narrator's obsessively vigilant, paranoiac sensibility juxtaposes these more modest cooks with Antonin Careme, chef to Napoleon and to Czar Alexander. Careme orchestrates fabulous banquets that culminate in architectural confections whose most important qualities, smoothness and whiteness, indict the more modern households for their pervasive decay, rot, and disorder.

``Hell'' casts a reproachful daughter's eye on the '50s housewife, the dull misery of domestic servitude, the paradox of appliances that encumber rather than free. Without a greater purpose, the narrator's mother devotes herself to tedious, ugly crafts, painting historic scenes on ``hundreds (maybe thousands) of lampshades in her lifetime.'' But in the pessimistic vision of this novel, even Careme's sublime concoctions are wasted on the guests assembled around Napoleon's table: So here is yet another hell, that of the creative life, of slaving over what is rarely appreciated, what is at best gobbled and forgotten.

What does the nervous consciousness behind this novel want? What is it groping toward? Reading ``Hell'' is enervating, like being on a long, weary night watch during which shadows take on grotesque proportion to an overstimulated, sleep-deprived mind. Intimations of foul play, a morbid sensibility that hears an exhaust fan murmur ``mrrrt, mrrrt, murder, murder,'' an obsession with death and decay, these converge around one thread of suspense, one mystery that the reader hopes might be solved: that of the death, or murder, of the narrator's childhood friend, Joy.

With the narrator, Joy is one of a band of children who collect around Benny Gold, a strange, messianic figure who leads his disciples through the woods on nature hikes charged with menace -- menace of both the ordinary and the sexual variety. After a freak storm, Joy is discovered dead in a stream; later, police find a child's underwear in Gold's house. These events, standard in thrillers, draw the reader along an attenuated thread of suspense, one Davis seems willing to break repeatedly. The mystery, never solved, suffers the segues between one household and another; not only does the book make no attempt to orient the reader, it betrays an almost perverse desire to baffle and misdirect.

``Something is wrong in the house.'' ``What's wrong here?'' ``Something's wrong.'' ``Something has been, is, and always will be wrong . . .'' Over and over the narrator, who is still subject to the magical thinking of childhood (believing, for example, that the occupants of the dollhouse think and feel so long as the house remains closed), tries to name an evil that is present, palpable, but not yet understood. Perhaps ``Hell'' is the record of a child's slow, shocked recovery from the disassociation that followed a friend's murder. Or perhaps this hell wants to include all of us. Experience without meaning, desire without joy (for this is a book about the death not only of a character named Joy but of joy itself): The only solace Davis offers is that of art. She writes powerfully enough to tempt us further and further into her very uncomfortable clutches.