Perplexities

By Christopher Porterfield

THE SALT LINE

by Elizabeth Spencer

Doubleday; 302 pages; $15.95

It happens so suddenly and perceptibly that it suggests a line drawn across a map: at a certain point approaching the Mississippi coast, the air fills with the salt smell of the Gulf of Mexico. At the scent of it, one woman feels her blood turn "as though the moon had swayed it." For all of the characters in Elizabeth Spencer's elegantly written novel, her first in twelve years, the salt line divides past and present, memory and desire, placidity and jeopardy. Crossing it brings everyone into the swirling orbit of the book's protagonist, Arnie Carrington. Arnie, sixtyish, is a former professor of English at an upstate university, a lifelong activist who reigned during the 1960s as a champion of campus protest movements ("Carrington cares!" the students once chanted). He left the university much as his hero Byron left England: under threat of sexual scandal, in his case trumped-up. He moved to the gulf, where his wife soon died of cancer. Now, salvaging his own ruins, he has found a new cause in the devastation left behind by the 1969 hurricane Camille: real estate. Arnie wants to put his few holdings, which include an island just offshore, into the hands of people who will restore the serenity of the past amid all the motels and waffle houses. This emphatically does not include Frank Matteo, a flashy young restaurateur with Mafia connections whom Arnie suspects (rightly) of seeking his island as a conduit for foreign narcotics. Matteo is both more and less than a customer, however. To a reformer like Arnie he is an irresistible candidate for moral redemption, and the way to reach him appears to be through his castoff, pregnant girlfriend, who has taken refuge under Arnie's mostly paternal wing. Arnie cannot keep faith with the past without summoning up its burdens. These arrive one day in the form of a familiar family hunting for a dream house along the gulf: Lex Graham, the ambitious colleague who undermined Arnie at the university; Lex's sleek wife, who is eager to resume the affair she and Arnie once conducted; and Lex's cherished daughter, a high school belle who has reached just the right age to have her head turned by Arnie's romanticism. Such sun-drenched perplexities are home ground for Author Spencer, who for more than three decades has been publishing subtle, meticulous fiction about her native Mississippi (The Voice at the Back Door) and about Americans in Italy (The Light in the Piazza). She seems to have conceived The Salt Line as her Tempest, with Arnie as an eccentric but passionate Prospero. She portrays him in clear Southern light that shines with a "persistent, steady, invisible fallout of blessing." She invests him with a slightly seedy spirituality by surrounding him with motley religious remnants: an 18-ft.-high statue of the Buddha (flotsam from the hurricane) that he has stashed in his yard; a nuns' shrine to St. Francis that he tends on his island; an occult Mexican medal that dangles from his neck. Spencer's handling of these images leaves the reader conscious at every moment of a high skill and intelligence -- indeed, perhaps too conscious. Individual scenes are admirable, as when Arnie's hapless rival Lex, visiting the sanctum of Arnie's island, seeks an epiphany in a swarm of butterflies ("a world of translucent amber, the dazzle of deep dimension, pulsing to its own notion"), only to be felled moments later by a mysterious snakebite. But such effects are fitted so neatly into place, their significance so finely chiseled, that one almost hears the click of the craftsman's tool. As a result, the energies of Spencer's narrative remain muted, her conclusion equivocal. Even Lex, from whom violence might have been expected (he once pointed a pistol at a triumphant Arnie on campus), drifts off in a paralysis of frustration and despair. The final chapters echo with questions like those Arnie addresses to the Buddha:

"How can we gather everything up? Everything we know?

Everyone we know? And preferably not as corpses." In an early flashback to Arnie's desolation after the death of his wife, he climbs on the back of a giant turtle swim ming out to sea. "Take me to the deep," Arnie says, but the creature swims out from under him and is gone.

In time, Spencer's novel slips out from under the reader as well, but until it does, the ride is beguiling.

-- By Christopher Porterfield