Soft Focus

THE HOUSE ON COLISEUM STREET (242 pp.)--Shirley Ann Grau--Knopf ($3.50).

Shirley Ann Grau is a master of the Soft-Focus School of fiction. The events of her stories and novels are not so much perceived as vaguely apprehended, looming unexpectedly through an ambiance of feeling. In her oblique vision the disappointments of childhood are glimpsed in a puddle of frozen gutter water, the fears of adulthood suggested by the sharp, metallic smell of a nearly defunct streetcar line. The method can be tedious, but in her second novel, New Orleans-born Author Grau proves again that in the hands of a first-rate storyteller the shortest route between fact and feeling is not necessarily the straight line.

In the house on Coliseum Street live two half sisters with their mother, who is just going through her fifth husband. All three are plagued by vague fears of death and desertion, and they ease them in various ways--the mother by marrying every man she meets instead of "just sleeping with them," the younger daughter by sleeping with everybody she cannot bear to marry, and the older daughter, Joan, by riding New Orleans streetcars and listening far into the night to Wagner's Liebestod. Boredom and jealousy of her sister lead Joan into an affair, and soon she finds herself pregnant. She has an abortion, and what follows is a subtly detailed, enormously effective chronicle of mental collapse. When she learns that her lover is having an affair with someone else, she takes to roaming the streets at night in her secondhand car, following the couple from bar to bar, parking outside the man's apartment until the lights in his bedroom snap off. She manages to break up the affair, but it does not help. Whenever she feels "the quivering, shaking uncertainty coming near her," she sneaks off and recites the story of her abortion aloud, "using the crudest words she could think of." For a time she tries to become pregnant again with another man ("The hurt will stop when all that empty space is filled up"), but even that does no good.

Novelist Grau is deliberately vague about the outcome. What concerns her here, as in her earlier books (The Hard Blue Sky and The Black Prince and Other Stories), is not plot but the endless flux of feeling. Writers of encyclopaedic novels would do well to read her--and learn how to catch the shape of a lifetime in the merest shadow of an event.

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