Books: Challenge of the Bizarre

TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON by Marjorie Kellogg. 216 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Most plots offer the writer a chance to show what he can do; bizarre or grotesque plots are more often a test of what he can refrain from doing. Here, for example, is a novel about three characters. Warren, Arthur and Junie, who set up platonic housekeeping together, squabble amiably, seek work, vacation at the seashore and, in various ways, find love. Presumably, such a book would have to be filled with novelistic bravado to lift it above the humdrum. But since Warren is a paraplegic, Arthur a near-spastic and Junie a hideously deformed victim of an acid attack, the atmosphere is already painfully tense. The challenge for the author is to keep everybody’s emotions—his own, his protagonists’ and the reader’s—from getting out of control.

First Novelist Kellogg, 46, succeeds most of the time by means of firm tact and dry-eyed restraint. Her characterizations are neither bathetic nor sensationalized. Whenever the book begins to soften into sentimentality, which is a little too often, she flashes a cauterizing wit. She also resists the temptation to moralize. The common humanity of her people reveals itself indirectly, through their power to stir other lonely beings whose disfigurements are merely emotional. Arthur’s death after his brief romance with Junie is rather predictable, and the ending is too pat. But Miss Kellogg displays an easy, lightly satirical command of the hospital-medical milieu, as befits a professional therapist (one of her patients was the late Carson McCullers). And, perhaps most promising of all, she writes with a crispness and economy that is all too rare in any novel—first, last or in between.