The Web of Character and Culture

Total Immersion

By Allegra Goodman

Harper & Row

$16.95, 254 pp.

THERE is something about Allegra Goodman's collection of short stories, Total Immersion that reminds me of my grandmother. When my grandmother, who is from the South, tells a story, you hear about the person's relatives and the relatives' relatives, and their relatives--and so on and so on.

I often get lost in my grandmother's stories. They are filled with connections I miss, names of people I don't know and things I don't understand. But I know they would be really interesting if I could just get the people straight.

I get the same feeling from Goodman's stories, which are filled with faceless characters whose lives are enmeshed in bizarre and often unclear ways.

But, unlike my grandmother's descriptions of broken marriages and local scandals, Allegra Goodman's collection of short stories is very, very funny.

And I am impressed that it was written by a Harvard senior.

GOODMAN'S book is primarily about the problems of maintaining conservative Jewish values in unlikely settings--Hawaii and Oxford, England. Total Immersion is about identity and the problems of balancing different cultures and reconciling tradition with modern problems.

But Goodman's satirical humor is what carries the book. She writes about the hypocrisy of Jewish life in Hawaii, the fundamental impossibility of modernizing ancient Jewish law and the selfabsorption of both young and old.

Goodman describes in "Variant Text" an agnostic but rigidly observant househusband who wears an Abortion Rights button to Sabbath services and responds to a colleague's questions reagarding his faith with, "When you read a book, do you have to know the author to enjoy it?"

Goodman portrays in "Wish List" the passionate and literary obsession of a female Israeli novelist for a beautifully built worker who can only respond to her allusions to D.H. Lawrence novels with a request for some eggs.

This is just a sampling of Goodman's strange assortment of offbeat characters, who live in a fascinating world of mixed cultures.

AT the same time, however, Goodman's world is sometines difficult to understand, and her writing style is not helpful. The world she creates--whether it is in Hawaii, England or the American mainland--requires total immersion to read. With her multitude of names of the people streaming in and out her characters' lives and Goodman's frequent use of Hebrew, Yiddish and Hawaiian terms, the book is sometimes painful to wade through. Goodman writes:

Jonathon turns to Moshe and Dovidl as they unroll the Torah. "Would you like a Sephardic or an Ashkenazic melody? Actually, I rather fancy Sephardic. I picked up a lovely niggun in Turkey." Jonathon bends over the scroll and begins the laiining in his light, springy head tone.

Fortunately, the author has included a glossary of terms at the back of the book. It becomes increasingly necessary through the course of the collection.

In some ways, Goodman's work feels like a gimmick. With her unusual background--growing up in a Jewish home in Hawaii while also spending time in England and then attending Harvard--the author has unique experiences to draw from for her stories. With this kind of life, it seems that anything she wrote would have to be original and thought-provoking. One of the author's characters, a poet and taxi-driver in New York explains this reasoning:

My kids are really lucky. They're growing up in at least five cultures: the traditional Yemeni at their grandmother's the Orthodox shtieble on the corner, Israel every summer, my friends from the Institute of Social Analysis and Greenwich Village, and our black neighborhood. That combination is just about unbeatable.

BUT there is something more to this book than that. Total Immersion is more than a series of sketches of specialized communities-it provides a humorous and engaging commentary on human nature.

The work might not be as impressive if it wasn't written by a 21-year-old. But it is very funny. Goodman's voice is assured and her humour is sharp. And despite her convoluted details, she gets to the point a lot faster than my grandma.