Wanting It Now

By Martha Duffy

WALKING PAPERS by Sandra Hochman. 211 pages. Viking. $6.95.

To what has become one of the decade's most popular questions, Freud admitted having no answer: What does a woman want? One would like to have been able to slip him a copy of this first novel--a long, first-person, Portnoyesque rant that seems to wedge at least 30 years of neurotic female yearning into its emancipated pages.

The heroine, Diana Balooka, wants everything, wants it now and in generous portions. To be loved by someone who knows his polymorphous pleasures. To be praised by someone who appreciates wit and brains and who is willing to hang in there night after night repeating the whole litany. To be a poet. To tap-dance beautifully. In short, to be a goddess with an indeterminate number of arms dipping ravenously into life's possibilities.

Reality is lamentably different, though one gets to feel that Diana is one hell of a tap-dancer. She is a rich, intelligent New York woman, "32, going on a thousand." There are three fractured marriages in the past and four nearly forgotten children.

Diana's current lover is an Armenian named Haig, and she is obsessed by him. Once on the beach, "he took a stick and drew a heart around the place where we made love." Now that is the kind of flourish Diana adores, but few short of Don Juan could keep up the pace. Throughout the book, Haig is at bay, like an aging opera star pressured into too many roles.

After turning the last page, one feels that there are still more divorce papers and more lovers in Diana's future, and that she will never scale down her demands. Her story is told in rather slapdash fashion: the children, for instance, seem like shadowy refugees from an earlier draft. The tone shifts too suddenly and too often--from comedy to com- plaint to rather fancy lyricism. Nonetheless, the author, a poet with four volumes of graceful, glib verse to her credit, has written a heroine who is sturdier and funnier than she perhaps intended. Diana is a girl with the courage of her own selfishness. A girl right out there doing her buck and wing.

-Martha Duffy

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