Be Prepared

By R. Z. Sheppard

DAUGHTER BUFFALO

by JANET FRAME

212 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

With nine novels to her credit, New Zealand's Janet Frame still offers something of a fielder's choice: whether to praise the strength of her poetic imagination or question the precarious structures of her novels, which are part prose, part poetry, part fiction and part personal reverie. Like dreams, her narratives advance and recede according to the most private tides of consciousness. Like dreams, they have a coherence that is easily bruised by interpretation.

Miss Frame's persistent themes are loneliness, madness and death. But again, as in dreams, distinctions dissolve and the themes can be interchangeable. In Daughter Buffalo, billed as her first novel with an American setting, even the characters seem to blur into each other. Talbot Edelman, M.D., is a self-acclaimed student of death whose inquiries include mutilating experiments on his dog Sally. A lyric-writing old gent named Turnlung is also an expert--a virtual memory bank of death and that other equable state, prenatal life. Both Talbot, the death scientist, and Turnlung, the death artist, develop a need and deep affection for one another. Both are in training for death, and it seems fair to construe that their love is the main event. For to love is to accept the certainty of eventual loss.

This loss is reflected in fadebacks to life and death in a New Zealand family. Such returns to a private past suggest autobiography, and their effect on the book is like those Japanese puppet shows in which the puppeteer is camouflaged in black but just visible and working openly against a black back drop--a subtle reminder to viewers that the puppets are not their own masters.

As in previous novels like Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room and, more recently, Intensive Care, the author examines conventional attitudes toward death with both satire and wistful poetry. Talbot's parents, for example, respond to mortality by rushing an elderly relative into a nursing home with a sigh of relief that Miss Frame compares with "the faint whirr made by the garbage disposal unit when it comes to rest after doing its work." Yet her central symbol for this evasive herdlike response to death is a six-month-old buffalo in the Central Park Zoo that is "already trained to bewilderment, immobility upon a counterfeit earth."

Frame is also an anti-McLuhanite. "Where the written word allows us to siphon off small doses of death," she writes, "the image in the moving picture does not even wait to invite us, it abducts us to the scene with the result that we have a collection of ungrieved-over deaths in our storehouse and a scarcity of feelings to match them." A dead Turnlung can elicit feelings because he endures as a body of poetry.

When he is resurrected in an epilogue, it is as if Miss Frame herself had wakened from the slightly mad dream of her own novel. The talk is of reality's slippery nature, and the implication is that the artist's reality is often a nec essary derangement. Frame fans may recall the doctor in Faces in the Water, who cancels his patient's lobotomy and confesses: "I want you to stay as you are."

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