Thin Reality, Thin Dream

MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING by Marguerite Young. 1,198 pages. Scrioner. $10.95.

The mind boggles. The disc slips. Marguerite Young's phantasmagoric novel of a dream journey across the U.S. contains 1,198 pages. Some phantasmagoric novel! Only a fictional pressagent's verbal weapons could describe it: "Marguerite Young's new novel is so big that if its air conditioning is turned off, clouds form inside. Its electrical system contains 11,425 miles of copper wire. None of it connected. The cement that went into its construction could build Grand Coulee Dam, with enough left over to fill a wash tub into which might be placed the feet of the Scribner's editor who okayed it for publication."

Ledge of Actuality. In fact, this is an outrageously bad book, written by an author with very little of interest to say, even to herself, and very little skill in saying it. It is composed of a swamp of hallucinated recollections, in the center of which resides a distracted spinster named Vera Cartwheel. She dithers madly and endlessly about her childhood, which was spent--in thin reality or thin dream--in a fantastic seaside mansion in New England. There she lived, or never lived at all, with an opium-soaked mother, two butlers, only one of them real, a spooky lawyer named Spitzer and a nursemaid named

Miss Macintosh, who may have been a man and who was almost certainly a suicide. All this is recalled on a nightmarish bus trip, which the middle-aged Vera takes, or does not take, in search of the dead Miss Macintosh.

This is unpromising in summation and wholly unreadable in execution. The author's method is to teeter on the window ledge of actuality for a few sentences at the beginning of each chapter and then jump into vagueness, singing like Ophelia.

Big Bad Books. How did such a book come to be written? The author's error may have been in accepting too literally a favorite fancy of the 20th century--the psychiatric truism that omens seen in dreams are more accurate than those visible to the waking mind.

As to the publisher, there are two possibilities. One is that Scribner recalled, in a wistful twinge of corporate memory, that Thomas Wolfe manuscripts used to arrive in packing cases, too. The other is that the publisher is employing the Big Bad Books technique. This variance of the Big Lie depends on reviewers becoming nervous and thinking that no book could be that big and that incoherent without being a little bit great. If Scribner can squeeze one "vast panorama" out of one important-sounding reviewer, Novelist Young has nothing to worry about. Unless, of course, the air conditioning fails.

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