Cluttered Truths

MOST BOOK JACKETS are meaningless eye catchers, but the designer of Madeleine L 'Engle's latest novel exhibits a starting perspicacity. Behind plain white lettering. A Severed Wasp is covered with dense tapestry like patterns of violet, lavender and deeper purples, the type of ribbed stripes that appear inside the covers of very old books. Only the volume's square boundaries give any shape to the intricate interplay of threads and colors.

The inner reaches of A Severed Wasp share some of the same intricacy, the same denseness, and finally the same frustration. Tracing the first summer of retirement of Katherine Vigneras, a world-renowned pianist, Wasp gradually unfolds the story of Katherine's tribulation-filled career and life through her encounters with a group of bishops and deans of St. John the Divine's Cathedral in New York City, where she has at last settled down for good. She has always tended to accumulate proteges, and within two weeks of her arrival she is heavily involved in the lives of a career doctor who lives downstairs: a once promising teenage ballet dancer newly crippled in a car accident: a young bishop who looks strikingly like a man by whom Katherine secretly bore a child: and the bishop's retired predecessor, Felix Bodeway, who also figured in a previous L 'Engle novel about Katherine's youth.

All the characters have the believable warmth and humanity that mark most of L 'Engle's creations. Many are familiar from earlier book's though they have aged and intermarried oddly. They come by their wisdom and perspective honestly, especially Katherine, for whom L 'Engle's has concocted a truly harrowing life. But though each individual character and plot turn are vivid and arresting, the layers upon layers of personal interaction and tormented memory manage only to form a staggering, nearly shapeless mass. L 'Engle writes with care, even virtuosity, and she occasionally attains moments of manage only to form a staggering, nearly shapeless mass. L 'Engle's writes with car, even virtuosity, and she occasionally attains moments of great loveliness. But subplots, marriages and infidelities, abortions and accidental confessions multiply and repeat to obscure the kind of simple striking movement that L' Engle seems always to have delivered before. What remains is a densely plotted thriller.

Part of the problem may lie in a distinction L 'Engle's herself refuses to make the distinction between "children's" literature and a standard issue adult novel. The books which have brought her renown are a trilogy of semi fables about space, time and the forces of darkness, seen through the eyes of young adolescents: A Wrinkle In Time. A Wind In the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Though filled with unexpected plot turns, all three of these adventures are held together by a guiding sense of larger purpose-not only of the author but of the universe. Of her other works-a series of family stories, a few volumes of poetry, memories and novels for audiences of various ages-none has struck nearly so loud a chord.

Wasp, though not L 'Engle's first "adult" book, carries all the faint creakiness of a hitherto cloister adult valiantly tackling "the real world." Her multiplicity of competing threads and emotions occasionally betrays her into a line straight out of soap opera ("She did not want the perspicacious doctor to guess that she was fascinated by the attractive young bishop"), but more often it reduces Katherine to a passive, dubious on looked at the complexity. She hardly knows what to think when her old friend, Felix, unexpectedly tells her the spent years cruising the gave bars Greenwich Village or when a young tenant comes running to her for advice on husband's infidelity and so her support is limited to words of undeniable wisdom but limited fictional effect.

SUCH POCKETS OF BANALITY are of course, the small price L 'Engle's pays for attempting the supremely difficult task of writing about wisdom. If one theme emerges from the vast range of her topics and styles, it is the author's basic sense of sanity-an innate balance and perspective on the floppy subject she takes on.

In A Wrinkle In Time and other early work, that sense of sanity transforms wild adventures from planet to planet, from era to era, or across the continental U.S. into graceful journeys towards adulthood and understanding. In Katherine Vigneras' world the characters suffer the distractions of war out accidents castration, and absence phone calls, but amid the confusion children grow in wisdom: understanding parents discuss the family's harmony and the best solace: and people of all ages are relaxed and inspired by classical music.

That basic serenity, though muddled in Wasp, retains for this latest book its strongest quality to confront starlight on the larger questions of morality and the universe. The most interesting dilemma posed and indeed and the only one carried through consistently, is the crisis of faith among the cathedral's staff in the face of terror and bereavement. At a party, someone brings up "a tidbit from seminary training. "a quotation from George Orwell:

[A wasp] was sucking jam on my plate and I cut him in half. He paid no attention merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed verged esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.

The consternation among the bishops, who seriously discuss Orwell's analogy to modern man-who "did not notice...that it was absolutely necessary that the soul be cut away"-ring truer than any of L 'Engle's accounts of death, shame and estrangement. The sections shows that the author's strength is still her ability to make questions of good and evil seem human and dramatic: the unnecessary clutter of A Severed Wasp suggests that she has mistaken her topic, but not her theme.