Unlit by Love

EVA TROUT by Elizabeth Bowen. 302 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Elizabeth Bowen is one of the few of Virginia Woolf's many imitators who learned something positive from her fragile literary experiments. Instead of stringing endless psychological trivia, Bowen builds a strong psychic mood by carefully picking her details--cars, lies, daydreams--and arranging them with an experienced, measuring feminine eye.

Eva Trout, Bowen's eighth novel, is typical of her writing and unlike anything else being published today. Once more the author concerns herself with the domination of the strong by the weak; "they have such incredible staying power," one character laments. Eva is the formless, feckless person who flouts the schemes and designs of subtler minds. At 25, she is an heiress. Her mother died in a plane crash; her father, a homosexual tycoon, was a suicide. Her guardian was her father's partner in business and in bed. He alternately tries to manipulate her for her money or avoid having to confront her at all.

But there is no solution to the problem of Eva, at least none available to planning or cunning. She is strange, capricious, almost moronic. What she is looking for, as she darts about in her Jaguar or flits from London to Chicago or Paris, is a usable identity and some emotional connections. The story concludes melodramatically with a murder, but before that, Eva has adopted a deaf-mute child from a black-market ring and proposed marriage to a youth much younger than she.

Most writers would raise an inch or so of suds atop this murky flow of events. Bowen tells the story in a series of sharp, enclosed scenes with irony, dry humor and a terse, elliptical style. She sets pragmatists against emotionalists, opportunists against those who answer only to the hungers of the heart. Like Portia Quayne, the heroine of Bowen's best-known novel. Death of the Heart, Eva leads a life totally unlit by love. She attracts people, but when they reach out for her, they grope in darkness.

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