Willow, Willow

THE THIRD CHOICE (333 pp.)--Elizabeth Janeway--Doubleday ($3.95).

"Speech after long silence, it is right," wrote Yeats in a poem about the gulf between the sexes. Author Janeway's novel deals with the same subject, but unfortunately it consists of speech after long speech. Most of the talk is mournful, and most of it is carried on by women. There are men in the novel, who say "what the hell" quite often, but they are neither very important nor very real. They are the book's furniture, and when one of them stabs himself, the reader is merely baffled, as if a sofa had suddenly stood on end during a tea party and spilled its stuffing in grief.

As is necessary in every well-maided novel, there is a fierce, unfazed and unfaded old matriarch brimming with hard-won wisdom, and a willowy, willful girl sorely in need of it. The matriarch, in this case, has broken her hip and may never ride to the hounds again, so she has plenty of time to look back at her own willowy and willful stage. Should she have deserted her husband to run off with worthless Gerald? Should she have abandoned her illegitimate daughter to be brought up by a Belgian family? No, evidently, to the second question; the girl grew up to become the mistress of two German officers, and the women of the Resistance shaved off her hair. But a fierce, unfazed yes to the first; although life is unpleasant, it must be met squarely. At novel's end, the willowy girl courageously casts aside thoughts of her anguished lover and suicidal husband and stands alone, buttressed only by health, wealth and the example of her indomitable old aunt.

Author Janeway (The Walsh Girls, Daisy Kenyan) has attempted a novel of pother and passion, and has succeeded only in forcing her story into the mold of cakemix fiction. For those who like store-bought cake, skilled Novelist Janeway has a lot to offer--the smooth batter of dialogue, the raisins of sentiment, and even, here and there, a few nourishing calories of characterization.

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