O Guru, My Guru

RAGE OF THE SOUL (313 pp.)--Vincent Sheean--Random House ($3.50).

Outward bound for India, Liz Redwood, 37, is a tense package. After a few days at sea, she confides in another woman passenger: "What would you say . . . if I told you I was a woman . . . taken in adultery." The other passenger advises Liz to forget it and enjoy the trip. But Liz can't forget, and can't forgive herself. Her husband Charles, a steady fellow who works for the State Department, had been terribly understanding about the whole thing, too. But Liz insisted on a separation, and a trip to India, to find herself.

To make matters worse, Liz gets that old loose-woman feeling whenever she is near the ship's captain ("Wave after wave of cigar smoke, eau de cologne and maleness broke over her"). Sure enough, she falls again, and thinks she has stripped her moral gears for keeps. At this logical jumping-off place for a French bedroom farce, Novelist Vincent Sheean, writing with perfect seriousness, has his heroine leap into Indian mysticism. In Sheean's handling, it is as crashingly pointless as a dive into an empty swimming pool.

Liz heads for a guru (Hindu wise man) as soon as she hits Calcutta, and they swap profundities. She: "How can one know the time?" He: "You cannot know until it has come." She: "The readiness is all? But I am ready." He: "Then you cannot have long to wait." This kind of talk is a bit heady for Liz and she experiences darshan, "a certain electro-magnetic flow."

Well magnetized, she is drawn to a second guru's colony for would-be initiates. This turns out to be a clip joint where the believers turn in all their worldly goods to a matronly supply sergeant known as the "Divine Mother." Liz spots it all for a fake and heads back to Guru No. 1. In the meantime, steady old Charles has got himself into a diplomatic jam. Reminding herself of the guru's "Truth is in your own heart," Liz looks there, finds she still loves Charles, flies back to help him face the music. As they clinch on the runway, Charles says: "Let's not moan and groan . . . let's bill and coo." And they do. It completes a modern passage to India heavy with First Class platitudes.

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