Suburban Daydreams

ALL THE ABANDONED CHILDREN by George Constable. 200 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.75'.

"Jessie," says a boy friend, "you're like a philosopher in reverse. You're a walking daydream." So she is. She writes herself letters at work ("Dear Madame: Hi"), puts them in her In basket ("Oh, look, a letter for me") and answers them ("Dear Madame: Hi. Glorious morning, isn't it?"). She plays games with herself such as How Can That Be?, in which she makes up an impossible situation, asks herself "How can that be?" and is disappointed if she cannot concoct a way it could be. She is unable to explain, for instance, why "an upside-down-speedboat made of rose petals was in orbit around the moon."

Jessie is only one of the daydreamers who wander through this inventive, whimsical first novel about private rebellions in suburbia. Jay, 22, has given up everything to become the disciple of a crackpot who makes clandestine radio broadcasts about morality. Cathy, aged 12, is trying to decide whether God goes around naked or lives in a cemetery. Ethel, 23, hears voices, hates her husband, resents her baby, and is determined to become a prostitute in her spare time. And there is Teddy, the five-year-old prodigy who is Author Constable's hero. Teddy uses geodesies to keep track of the neighbors, and if it weren't for him no one would know that the neighborhood children were in terrible danger. How can that be? The answer is not altogether convincing, but neither is the stuff of which most daydreams are made.

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