Lost Generation

By Paul Gray

BEFORE MY TIME

by MAUREEN HOWARD 241 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

Traditional novelists toss pebbles into domestic pools and then take notes. The postwar fashion has been to track these projectiles directly into the muck below, but there is another, older way. As masters like Henry James and Virginia Woolf knew, the ripples on the surface can bedevil the eye and engage the mind. Before My Time brushes up this earlier technique. It transforms a brief disturbance of hearth and home into an age of anxiety.

Laura Quinn, fortyish, opens her suburban Boston home to Jim Cogan, 17, the son of Bronx relatives. He is awaiting arraignment in New York, charged with involvement in a lunatic guru's plot to blow up the public library. His future is on the line. If she hopes to persuade him to change, Laura realizes, she will have to put her past on the line too.

So far, so predictable: Matron meets the Son of Counterculture. Laura obediently bridles at the "spiritual onanism that leads these fools, these mindless children, to glorify themselves, or the self and its own ignorance." She is also physically stirred by Cogan, a shaggy "Montaigne in love beads, discarding whole areas of Western culture that do not serve him." Laura counterattacks with her "small focus of self-knowledge, the sweep of history," watches her admonitions founder against his coltish arrogance and her own proliferating self-doubts.

Then nothing and something happen. Laura and Jim remain at loggerheads, while a swarm of supporting players takes over the stage. Laura's beloved brother, killed in Korea, returns to haunt her. Bearing a blunted spear is her husband Harry, a disappointed lawyer-politician now resigned to tinkering with the Massachusetts Democratic Party machine. In come Jim's parents, a bewildered, gin-swilling mother and a gambling father off on a lifetime losing streak. The cast swells to include an Italian immigrant, a Jewish real estate tycoon and assorted Cogan relatives. Without warning, what might have been just another serving of tea and sympathy has become a documentary on U.S. civilization and its discontents.

Some of the stories of these interjected characters seem overheard; others are told by Laura herself. Their precise meanings are elusive, their relevance to Laura indeterminate. Yet all equate the passing of tune with irreparable loss, and Laura comes to understand the relationship between her dead brother and Jim: "I want to be as he is now, to crouch at the starting line and I'm furious that it can't be."

Before My Time conveys a range of details and events that would be impressive in a novel twice as long. Although the design appears casual, the book's power is in its language. Time and again, a part is successfully substituted for a whole. One swallow can a summer make, if described with enough care, just as one scene can conjure up a lifetime. So a costumed hippie wandering the streets is pinned with words: "A child who has lost its role in the Christmas play." Quietly dropped epigrams cause wide ripples: "Family life is like the classics played in modern dress by an amateur troop. Vulgarized version of the old tales." Maureen Howard published two novels in the '60s that gained her a small following. After her first marriage to an English professor broke up, she married another, and now lives with him and her teen-age daughter in Greenwich Village. Although she is teaching a course at the New School in autobiographical writing, she says that Before My Time is not based on her life: "I tend to imagine and lie." She spent four interrupted years on the novel. "I would like to write faster," she says, "but life intervenes." That, triumphantly, is exactly what happens in her novel.

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