Wolves in Firelight

THE TROUBLE OF ONE HOUSE (314 pp.) --Brendan Gill--Doubleday ($3).

Love & death, the hero and the villain of biology, have also been starred in a lot of badly overwritten fiction. In a new first novel, The Trouble of One House, the old antagonists are presented with exact good taste. In Novelist Breudan Gill, moreover, readers are presented with a fine new ironist.

Love, says Ironist Gill, is not just the sweet mystery of life; it is a tremendous natural force that can shatter people who resist it. And people who truly know how to love can be dreadful nuisances in a world of people who do not.

Elizabeth Rowan knew how to love. She loved everyone simply for what he was: her husband for a cold, frightened man who dared not risk feeling much for anyone, her sister for a soul-sick shrew who could not control her bad feeling for everyone, her priest for a muddled half-innocent who did not yet know what he really felt about anything except religion. Almost all the people Elizabeth knew dreaded her love as much as they wanted it. Her husband once stormed at her: "I know there are times when it's worse than hating to love as you do--times when you're like a growth running wild, eating us, like a sponge swallowing us up, making us yours."

When Elizabeth died of cancer, all the people she loved rushed at her as much for vengeance as for grief, almost like wolves into the circle of a dying fire that had drawn them yet filled them with fear. In a fitful half-light of awareness, the characters of Brendan Gill's soft-moving, almost plotless novel rip tooth & nail at the memory of Elizabeth--at each other for possession of it, and finally each at himself in remorse for the dried smallness of his own loveless heart.

For the last 14 years Brendan Gill has been writing for The New Yorker, contributing deft stories and profiles, well-considered book reviews, and items for "The Talk of the Town" section. At 36, he is starting later than a lot of this year's first novelists, but evidently not because he has wasted time. In The Trouble of One House, his storytelling method, an indirect, impressionistic one with something of the quality of Virginia Woolf's, takes him precisely where he wants to go.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.