Alley-Catting, God Knows Where

DREAMS AND HALLUCINATIONS defy common sense yet intermingle with it like honeysuckle gradually choking its host plant. Althea bridges the gap between fantasy and reality. J.M. Alonzo's third novel is a brilliantly successful suspension of the reader's belief, a literary Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in which time, space and motivation convolute and distort one another so that one is both enmeshed and detached. Acid for the temperate.

X.J. Muldoon, the narrator, is a grad student at Harvard, worried by the prospect of an affair with a woman he labels "Norma the Nice"--she (surprise, surprise) turns out to be not quite so nice after all. He confesses:

"To me, women have been the opposite of people...fantasy...The more ruthless ones haven't wanted to give up this power. They've encouraged the male psyche...while the others, even when they wanted to be perceived as people, beyond fantasy, couldn't be. Because the male psyche needs no encouragement..."

Norma, his fantasy object, affects the accent of the Viennese doctor in Lugosi's Dracula as she discusses the "inner cheese of life." Just as self-consciousness leads Norma to make a joke out of the "energies of life," this whole book concerns Muldoon's discovery that the voice often masks the subject; action similarly disguises reality. Muldoon is aware that "unseen and mysterious forces" propel him. He recognizes that the Light--wisdom or maybe just balance--drawing him beyond the everyday world is as inevitable as the lure of the apple to Adam and Eve.

But he cannot initially progress beyond his scholar's ability to detect analogies. His fears and fantasies begin to wrench him apart the same way ivy destroys a crumbling brick wall. He tries to escape the banality, sex and violence that Malraux called the components of our world. Yet enlightenment and peace of mind escape him as he declares: "My soul had not yet completed its reentry into my body after its long night out, alley-catting God knows where."

Despite the author's attempts to define degrees of normality, there is no fixed moral code to which Muldoon can adhere. That, of course, is the quintessential dilemma of the thoughtful. What saves this book from the pseudo-philosophical platitudes such a theme might have spawned, however, is Alonzo's sense of the humorous and the bizarre, even in the midst of deadly sincerity. There may be moments when he speculates with great profundity and great tedium about every slimydeep secret in Muldoon's self-absorbed soul. Yet there is something appealing about a man who defines his condition thus: "The plumbing of my mind was suffering from a momentary backup and overflow of literary illuminations."

Althea chronicles the divorce of Muldoon-Adam from Fantasy-Eve. A slow divorce--it spans the late 1950s through 1973. It's a long book that moves as slowly and richly as a pageant, sometimes presenting vivid tableaus such as Muldoon's chance meeting with Norma after years apart--he no longer recognizes the dope-smoking, guerilla-garbed literary lioness Norma has become.

There are shades of Thomas Hardy in the book's cinematic evocation of background and its psychological portrait painting. But, although Alonzo's mysticism may stupefy one at times, his overall tone is seldom as professorial as Hardy's can be. Alonzo's writing approaches a Dadaesque neo-anarchism of spirit while using the vocabulary of surrealism. And these diverse elements, surprisingly, complement each other.

Muldoon finally realizes that Norma, his Fantasy-Eve, will always distract him yet admits at last to himself that other worlds "like the ones orbiting in the daily sports pages" attract him equally. Norma's final goodbye is couched in her old Viennese accent--sincerity proves harsh, good-humored cynicism masks realism once more: "Vell, zee Revolution calls, you know..."