BLAST FROM THE PAST

IN ROBERT HELLENGA'S SECOND NOVEL, A FAMILY GRIEVES A DAUGHTER'S MURDER

Author: By Jack Sullivan

Date: SUNDAY, July 26, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Robert Hellenga's new novel, ``The Fall of a Sparrow,'' does echo aspects of ``The Sixteen Pleasures,'' his immensely popular and acclaimed debut: It has sensitively drawn chapters from a young woman's point of view, richly evoked Italian scenes alternating with a Midwest setting, and enticing analogies between eroticism and art. But it is decidedly more sprawling, complex, and multifaceted than its taut predecessor, and is told mainly from the point of view of a middle-aged classics professor, with all the quirky allusiveness that stance implies. It is constructed a bit like Freud's vision of Rome (one of the novel's settings), in layers that resemble the human mind.

The central narrative in the labyrinth of stories within stories involves the Woodhull family's terrible struggle with grief following a 1980 bombing in Bologna that killed 22-year-old Cookie, the oldest of three girls. The psychological aftermath of this tragedy lands various family members in an asylum, a nunnery, and several spectacularly inappropriate beds. The character who behaves most self-destructively is the father, Woody, who sleeps with one of his students -- one whose mother he has also bedded and whose father is a potential $10 million contributor to the college. In his seven-year orgy of despair, Woody loses his wife, his house, and his job, winding up in Bologna testifying against his daughter's killers, supporting himself by singing blues at an osteria. His wife and daughters indulge in equally bizarre, if less colorful, behavior.

``The Fall of a Sparrow'' is about people struggling to reinvent themselves, to move out of the shadow of death. Progress is excruciatingly slow. For Sara, the older surviving daughter, ``Cookie's death was like a cable, binding us to the past. Sometimes we'd think we'd slipped the cable and were running free, but then we'd be brought up short, like a dog that forgets it's on a chain.'' For Woody, grief is an addiction: ``He couldn't help himself; he was drawn back to the station, to the second-class waiting room. . . . Like a man with a secret vice.''

Yet this novel is not at all depressing, but stimulating and inspiring. Self-destructive Woody and his family may be, but they are not self-pitying. They behave with a tragicomic stoicism utterly foreign to characters in recent recovery novels. Woody's inspiration is ancient Greek literature, but also the blues, as he explains in a disquisition on why he prefers it to country music: ``He wasn't a country singer crying in his beer; he was a bluesman who'd rather drink muddy water and sleep in a hollow log than let the bastards dog him around; who'd rather make himself a pallet on the floor where he could close his eyes and let a kindhearted woman ease his worried mind.''

Woody follows the blues model with a hilarious literalness; the women he sleeps with are indeed kindhearted, easing his worried mind and perhaps saving his life. They also land him in a heap of trouble, leading among other things to his being investigated by his dean and her ``gender consultant.'' These scenes constitute the novel's most entertaining layer, a savage satire on political correctness.

Woody connects his love life not only with the blues but with the Etruscans, and their profoundly erotic sense of ``being at home in the world.'' Indeed, all the characters ruminate on the philosophical ramifications of their actions. This is unapologetically a novel of ideas, with detailed discussions of art, politics, music, sexuality, evil, fate, food, the behavior of bats, and theories of chaos. When Sara is confronted by her new lover's wife, the two begin by arguing about adultery in Henry James; when Woody confronts Cookie's murderer, a young woman exactly Cookie's age, they argue about ``The Lord of the Rings,'' which Woody had read aloud to Cookie when she was a little girl and is horrified to learn is a fascist inspiration for her killer.

Some of Hellenga's most haunting ideas center on the nature of stories and storytelling. Unconsciously echoing each other, Woody and Sara in their separate narratives are obsessed by the incomplete story of Cookie, and therefore of themselves. Woody feels ``as if the pages had been ripped out of the book he'd been reading. . . . He wanted to finish her story, his story.'' Sara fears her beloved sister's death ended her own sense of life: ``It was like reading a short story and thinking it was a novel . . . all of a sudden you're at the end.''

Some will object that all this is too erudite and graduate-schoolish, that real people don't think or talk this way. But the issue is the same in any Austen or Forster novel: It's a pleasure to spend time with people who talk this way, even if real ones don't. Haven't we had enough suburban realism, minimalism, and anti-intellectualism, at least for a season or two? In any case, Hellenga's literate dialogue and interior monologue are completely in character for the intellectually adventurous Woodhull family.

The problem with ``The Fall of a Sparrow'' is not its rich profusion of ideas but a slackening of narrative tension toward the end, a loosening of the connections between its already serpentine narratives. Thematically, this winding down makes perfect sense: Woody learns to give up his grief very gradually, sotto voce, with a languid, Italian sense of peace and pace. We are left with ``no clouds parting, no bolt of lightning, just the sense that death need not poison life.''