Notable

BELLEFLEUR by Joyce Carol Oates Dutton; 558 pages; $12.95

"We have no choice but to be Americans now," says Raphael Bellefleur, descendant of French aristocrats and now the owner of a baronial estate in the New World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year-old wife. One of the Bellefleurs has a habit of leaving her window open so that her lover, a vampire, can fly in. Dwarfs bowl in the valleys, rivers change course, mountains shrink, and a man walks through a mirror so that, like Orpheus, he can enter the netherworld and find his own version of Eurydice.

In the past, Oates' touch has often been too heavy to sustain her fantasies. Ironically, in the barocco world of Bellefleur she is deft and self-assured. Even her contrived ending cannot mar a work that immeasurably enriches the 200-year-old tradition of the gothic novel.

VICTORIAN WORKING WOMEN: PORTRAITS FROM LIFE by Michael Hiley Godine; 142 pages; $17.50

In 1859, when he was 30, the wealthy Victorian Arthur Munby took upon himself a singular task: the detailed observation of women engaged in manual labor. Until his death in 1910, Munby faithfully made his rounds, traveling to Yorkshire fishing villages, to Welsh coal fields and, on occasion, to France and Belgium. The result of this avocation is a series of richly drawn portraits. Editor Michael Hiley has sifted through voluminous notes to provide a gallery of dustwomen, fishergirls, sackmakers, brickmakers and collier girls, complete with a sense of their accents, labor conditions, social attitudes, even the texture and color of their working costumes.

Munby admired "the beauty of manual labor"--so much so that he carried on a 19-year courtship with Hannah Cullwick, a maid-of-all-work, the lowliest of domestic servants (they were married in 1873, but Munby could never bring himself publicly to acknowledge the union).

He also appreciated the physical strength the women possessed. Waiting with Yorkshire fishergirls at the top of a 150-ft. cliff, from which they would descend to gather bait on the rocky shore below, he observed, "At last the rope at our feet began to tremble again. Instantly Molly and Nan started up, saying 'Wa mun gan an' help 'em,' these fearless lasses seized the rope, and before I could speak a word, began to run, Molly first, headforemost down the dizzy slope of rock, until they both disappeared over the edge of the cliff wall below. I, the man of the party, was left in a ridiculous position; a useless spectator of these vigorous athletics." Still, he was scrupulous in noting the harshness of women's work and its often paltry wages. Kitty, for example, was a typical milkgirl who spent her life walking "her rounds every day, carrying through London streets her yoke and pails and her 48 quarts of milk, in all weathers, rain or fair." Kitty and her colleagues were condemned to penury and obscurity. But history has its own methods of compensation: a century later, the notes and photographs of a neglected Victorian have given the author and his subjects a fresh stature and dignity.

THE SPIKE by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss; Crown; 374 pages; $12.95

Bob Hockney, crusading '60s journalist, is determined to expose his country's sins. The New Left Candide journeys abroad, uncovering scandals right and farther right--only to find that all of his anti-American scoops have been supplied by the Soviets. Nick Flower, former head of U.S. counterintelligence, explains: The KGB supports a worldwide "disinformation" network, including a Washington-based think tank. Its function: to churn out propaganda blaming the cold war on American intransigence and to place radicals on the staff of corn pone President Billy Connor.

The newly enlightened hero hunts down Soviet agents with all the skills he once employed against the CIA. But when he presents his expose to a New York newspaper, the editors grow icy. For they too are dupes of the Soviets, fearful of blackmail, or too ignorant to care. Hockney's story is temporarily "spiked," but the authors are too canny to make their thriller a downer. In a denouement that might please Senator Moynihan, all KGB cooperatives are flushed out of Government and journalism, and the sun sets on a happy, spy-free nation. Only a Martian would fail to spot the real characters in this roman `a clef, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Angleton, former counterintelligence chief, and a flock of other federal celebrities. But only a moon rock could fail to be intrigued by the book that has occasioned more gossip in Washington than Billy Carter's Libyan connection.

CONSUMING PASSIONS by Peter Farb and George Armelagos Houghton Mifflin; 279 pages; $12.95

Animals feed; humans eat. And the process of eating defines cultures and personalities. As the late Peter Farb and his collaborator George Armelagos indicate, "Food and drink have such intense emotional significance that they are often linked with events that have nothing to do with nutrition. The perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party were angry not over tea but over taxation; the breadline and apple-sellers of the Great Depression became symbols of what was wrong with the economy . . . the civil-rights movement . . . during the 1950s began as a dispute about the right of blacks not simply to eat at lunch counters but to sit down there with whites . . ." The interrelation of men and menus has filled hundreds of texts. But none of them have digested so many facts so well. Wittily, the authors explain why Muslims eschew pork (pigs would have been an ecological disaster in the Middle East) and why chicken soup --so-called Jewish penicillin--really does help to cure a cold (it comforts nasal passages). They show why Chinese drink no milk, discuss the Aztec hunger for human flesh (people who ate people were the victims of protein deficiency) and explain why Africa's Bemba society would collapse into chaos without beer (a major source of nourishment as well as a ceremonial beverage). Consuming Passions may not make consumers appreciate the Chinese taste for sea slugs or the African appetite for insects. But most of its hors d'oeuvres and entrees will make any reader grateful that man does not--and never did--live by bread alone.

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