RX for Guilt

By Paul Gray

THE DOCTOR'S WIFE by BRIAN MOORE 277 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

Sheila Redden, 37, stops off in Paris en route to a second honeymoon on the French Riviera. But Kevin, her husband of 16 years, is not with her. He is having trouble getting away from both his medical practice in Belfast and the provincial conviction that a foreign holiday is a waste of good Irish scenery. As any novel reader could tell him, he is not only courting cuckoldry but demanding it. Sheila, of course, falls in love with a handsome American, eleven years her junior, and goes off on a binge of sexual ecstasy well beyond the range of her convent-schooled imagination. The next thing Kevin knows, his wife is on the telephone with the news that she will not be coming home again.

Similar stories appear every month--and on glossier pages. Yet Novelist Brian Moore, 54, turns a potential stale helping of white wine and sympathy into an enigmatic moral thriller. In bed with her lover, Sheila sounds just like the lapsed Catholic she is: "I am in grace. In my state of grace." But what drives her--at the peak of her new-found happiness--to contemplate suicide? She is also obsessed with a more mundane form of annihilation: "Those men you read about in newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from again."

Sheila's plight echoes a refrain common to all of Moore's ten previous novels: when beliefs can no longer comfort, they turn destructive. Since her cloistered upbringing has made Sheila the victim of her own unsuspected passions it can hardly save her from them now.

Her brother tries to pull her back from the American and from what he fears is an incipient nervous breakdown. Yet he realizes that the old arguments will no longer work-- and that the new ones are limp and equivocating. "If this were 1935," he muses, "and Sheila were my father's younger sister, the whole discussion would have been conducted in the context of sin. I can talk about it only in the context of illness."

Moore deftly links the potential destructiveness of Sheila's behavior to larger rips in the social fabric-- particularly to contemporary Northern Ireland and to "Belfast bombed and barricaded." Sheila thinks it "a bad joke that when the people at home no longer believed in their religion, or went to church as they once did, the religious fighting was worse than ever." Later, during an argument with her brother, Sheila is blunt to the point of despair: "The Protestants don't believe in Britain and the Catholics don't believe in God. And none of us believes in the future."

Its sober artistry marks The Doctor's Wife as vintage Brian Moore. Sheila Redden may not be as hauntingly memorable as the heroine of Moore's first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956), but she is the most alluringly complex adulteress to come along in print in some time.

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