At Arm's Length

SOMETIMES YOU open a book and discover that the author knows who you are. Whatever you wind up thinking of the book as a whole, all the details are right--the writer seems to have a grip on your own imaginary landscape: your thoughts, your friends, your tastes, the way you remember things. If he's good, the author can build these shared instincts into a way of leaping the synapse between his words and his audience. Like conversation with an old friend, his sentences only have to go halfway toward you; you can complete the rest yourself and feel you've understood it better than if it had been explained.

Henry Bromell writes like this, and The Slightest Distance illustrates the unpredictability of the method. The book can seem anemic at one reading, and like God's truth the next. But whether or not Bromell's ideas are attractive to you, his book is worth thinking about. It's a collection of nine brief stories, each self-contained and too brief for much character development or even action. Bromell is content to catch the thoughts of his characters and let their personalities and histories fend for themselves. The stories grow on you, reminding you first of things that have already happened to you; later, things that happen seem to echo them.

All the stories concern the Richardson family, from the birth of Sam and Laura's youngest son, Question, in Virginia to a family reunion almost twenty years later in Venice. Sam joined the State Department to escape from his parents' life as Long Island country squires--hunting, fishing and putting up Christmas trees. Although he soon becomes disaffected with his job, he is compensated by the life of a diplomat: a few years here, a few years there, never staying in one place long enough to grow restless or attached to the surface of things. His three sons--Scobie, Matthew, and Quentin--grow up in snatches, in Kuwait, London, Athens, Switzerland. Each time Laura looks again at them she is awed by the opaque process through which they are being transformed from children who were once extensions of herself, into other, opaque human beings. As a successful family, in the end the Richardsons' relationship is that of old friends.

Each of the Richardsons is a thoughtful, intelligent person, and all are trying, in one way or another, to answer the basic question of how to live. They find an answer, although not a dramatic one, one that allows them to preserve their own calm without ignoring the powerful evils around them. "Only the moments exit, but not their imaginary combination," Laura says. "It's all a matter of balancing between the temptation to remember and the sympathetic magic of the still moment."

THE CONSTANTLY changing backgrounds of embassies, boarding schools, and airports have accustomed the Richardsons to looking at life this way. They have not been allowed to settle into routines which would prevent them from every once in a while spinning out of themselves and looking, as if far away, at what they are doing. Sometimes this is felt as alienation and each one passes through withdrawal, but the final result is commitment:

Stay in Greece or go back to America? In Greece he had clarity, quiet, time, memories. He studied the language, read, wrote. In America, he had nothing except a vague connection to the land. It was unhealthy, he suspected, to live at the center of the world. Once in America, only America exists.....All those mountains and rivers, the deserts and the snow, the ghosts of buffalo and the threats of holocaust. Perhaps--this bothered him--Greece had been something like this in her heyday. Perhaps the peace he felt there now was the peace of powerlessness. Problems had assumed human proportions again. People laughed and shrugged. They cared but they didn't worry. The sea and the marble and pines calmed the spirit. Or killed it--laid it in the eager hands of waiting colonels. The stubborn antiquity of Greece sometimes struck him as a manufactured dream, a distant product of the American imagination. Perhaps, after all, he must live in the middle of the machine, down among the bits and pieces of broken technology, down where truth was a mindless computation.

The distance Bromell creates between his characters, and between them and their lives, makes for an easy, casual calm. This calm assurance, in turn, is what makes his affirmations seem reasonable, even convincing. The Slightest Distance contains no melodrama, no startling events, no catastrophes. Our real life, it assumes, takes place in our minds, where the important things happen quietly, while on the outside it looks like nothing is changing.

BROMELL'S CHOICE of thoughts is spare and economical, but nearly always effective. The details--the way you can hear the hum of the island's single generator all night in a place like Cos; what a Habsburg railway carriage that has been reduced to second-class looks and smells like--seem just right if you're familiar with them, and as if they should be just right even when you're not. Sometimes, though, Bromell is too spare. His sentences can be too short, his transitions starched. But language and fine writing are only important to Bromell to the extent that they carry his webs of suggestion and nuance; for this they are usually adequate.

The Slightest Distance is a first novel, and a good one. But Bromell should go on to do better work. As with many things that are apprehended "like that", that click in your mind, the book can be disappointing to analyze. It should be read through, one story at a time, when you feel drawn by its atmosphere of vague, reassuring calm. Bromell resolves the problems of experience, power and human relationships in suggestive ways, but both his statement and his resolution are limited. There is a gentility to the selection of people, places and sentiments that can make the book seem lightweight. Not everyone is decent and thoughtful like the Richardsons, and Bromell doesn't have to answer for that. But there is probably more to life than keeping it, as Bromell suggests we should if we are to be happy, at just the slightest distance away.