A Ringing in the Third Ear

THE NEW YORKERS by Hortense Calisher. 559 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

This massive family chronicle begins impressively and then dissipates itself in authorish rhetoric and an obsessively circular kind of storytelling. In the end, the balance left to praise is slighter by the measure of Novelist Calisher's fondness for the supersubtle.

The New Yorkers of the title are the Mannixes, members of a dwindling clan of well-to-do Jews, and their carefully tolerant gentile connections. The story begins in the 1940s at a political dinner given in honor of Judge Simon Mannix, a shrewd, large-minded man who has been "mentioned" for the Supreme Court. He is well sketched by the author, and one impudent touch is superb: Mannix has a deaf son, she relates, and thus has learned to lipread. To know what is being whispered at a testimonial dinner is to be an ironist, and Mannix is one. As he leaves the dinner to exchange ruefulnesses with an ancient Virginia jurist, the reader looks forward to a wry tour, perhaps in the Edwin O'Connor manner, of the world of liberal politics and conservative finance in which the old Jewish and old WASP families of New York meet.

Addicted to Dashes. But on his return home, Mannix arrives at the precise instant when his twelve-year-old daughter shoots and kills her mother, whom she has found in bed with a lover. From this point, the story starts to eddy in sluggish circles. Judge Mannix, who had seemed to be the novel's main character, drops from the author's primary notice. He is not really replaced; instead, his crippled family is endlessly viewed and reviewed by its remaining members and a succession of friends. This inward turning is less absorbing than Novelist Calisher believes it to be. She listens with a tirelessly sensitive third ear for the psychological reverberations of the shooting, but there is little out of the ordinary to hear.

Straining for nuance distorts her prose. Unstrained, it moves in clear, strong sentences. Speaking of a man to whom education comes hard, she writes: "For a while he dragged each idea up the stairs like a heavy body." Listening for portents, she becomes girlish, sibylline, addicted to dashes and italics: "Consciousness, when first frightened into being, wants all the more to live by the fencepost and the stone. The human part is in speaking of it at all. Where I might have to lie. But I could have told anyone at once, like a shot, what I was afraid of. Anything in the bestiary describes its fears--as it moves."

The novel does come fitfully to life, usually in some transitional scene where the author is forced to view the society in which her New Yorkers still move. A wedding is done well; so is a smoothed-over gaffe at a dinner party and an old ballerina with her beauty in ruins but her vanity intact. The suspicion grows during the slow passage through this glum volume that it is not rightfully a psychological novel, but a strayed social one. It moves repeatedly in that direction, and always the author drags it back. That is her privilege, of course. Still, it is true that a clear eye, which she certainly has, can sometimes be more valuable than a third ear.

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