Well, he thought, well, well, well'

IF A. ALVAREZ had set out deliberately to prove the truism that good critics make bad novelists, he could not have devised a more convincing piece of evidence. When a critic turns to fiction writing in middle age, so some lack of burning inspiration may be inevitable, but this novel also shows an ignorance of the most basic tools of storytelling, not to mention an absence of the literary sensibility the author has demonstrated elsewhere. If Alvarez had turned his critical eye on his own work, this manuscript would never have seen the light of day.

The most Alvarez-like character in Hers, a graying professor of English literature, suffers from a similar blindness when it comes to looking into his own situation. Cuckolded left and right, he is capable only of sniffing at his wife's "roused animal juices" and muttering lines from Othello. The heroine of this book is no Desdemona, but she has the professor thoroughly confused; as the annoyingly well-informed narrator tells us several timer, he is so wrapped up in his books that he can't tell the real thing when it pokes him in the face. It is a cheap and half-hearted shot at academia, but it is the closest thing here to a point.

Polemics aside, hers aims to be a profound account of a woman's journey toward a sensual awakening, but Alvarez's small repertoire of narrative gestures is inadequate to create an interesting, surface, let alone psychological depth. Julie is a "waiflike" creature whose husband, despite his stuffiness, manages to have a sensuality "as massive and crushing as a Centurion tank." As the story begins, she is tolerating a routine of more-or-less intermittent rape; soon she is submitting a bit more cheerfully to one of her husband's students, Sam; by the end of the book she has left both of them in favor of a muscular blond Teuton who offers her what is evidently meant to be fulfillment:

Her pelvis heaved up and down, her buttocks labored while Kurt, now leaning closely over her, propped on one elbow, watched her closely but dispassionately, as he might have watched a conjurer explaining his tricks. And as she reached her climax, her head cleared of all its confusions and she emerged into a world as stark and white as the walls of her hospital room. That's it, she thought. That's it. yes.

This is the climax, all right, and the narrator baldly explains what it means: "Through him she was embracing her father's murderers. It was what she had always wanted." As a moment of realization it comes straight out of the blue for one thing, only the most attentive reader will recall at this point that Julie's father has been mentioned. It bears all the earmarks of a shattering revelation: Julie breaks down post coitum and sobs, the weather obliges with a rainstorm to maintain the right mood, and the chapter comes to an end. But it is revelation in a vacuum, unexpected and without point Alvarez never created a sense that anything needed revealing. There is no mystery or tension in this book, because nothing is hidden, and nothing is unexplained.

ONE OF ALVAREZ'S problems is that when he has something to say, all he can do is say it. When he wants a character to feel intruded upon, he manages it by narrative fiat: "he felt intruded upon." When Julie feels uncertain about herself, she looks in the mirror:

"I don't even know myself," she said out loud.

She doesn't have to say it out loud, either. Alvarez has no sense of narrative perspective; his omniscient narrator flits aimlessly in and out of the minds of his characters.

Alvarez's lesser characterizations range from the empty to the offensive. Sam's mother, making a brief appearance for the sake of color, is Jewish; her first four lines are:

"At my age" there was a throb in her voice "you don't expect to be remembered";"

You've lost weight. You don't look after yourself';

"Your cousin Harold earns five thousand a year and is married to a nice, respectable girl."

and

"Eat. I worry about you."

But more often, Alvarez's characters simply have nothing to say. Lack of raw imagination is no mortal sin, and there are other things to build novels on. But the sheer vacuousness of this book often verges on self-parody doubly so because the narrator is always there, reading off every inane thought. This from Sam, during fellatio:

Well, he thought, well, well, well, well.

Julie herself is as shallow as she is transparent, and Alvarez seems uneasily aware of it. He is continually describing her as "thin," "pale," "delicate," "Incorporeal" as if he would like to blame her when she fails to come off the page as a fully fleshed-out human being. She seems thin, he is trying to say, but there is really something to her. It doesn't work. In this book we can be sure that anything we don't know, Alvarez doesn't know either.