Books: Subhuman Wasteland

THE EDGE OF THE ALPHABET (303 pp.)—Janet Frame—Braziller ($4.95).

“Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden . . . especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products.” Thus does Author Janet Frame begin a strange book about three wasted lives in a dim world that she calls “the edge of the alphabet.” The phrase has a properly demented ring, and because Novelist Frame, in both fact and fiction, has spent some time in asylums, the reader at first thinks he is once more on the now depressingly familiar fictional grounds of a mental institution.

Instead, the edge of the alphabet proves to be a nebulous psychological limbo whose inhabitants are all the lonely, half-crippled, emotional misfits who exist on the pallid fringes of the everyday world. It is presided over by a weird, bodiless, placeless woman, Thora Pattern, from whose papers the story purports to be taken. Roving back and forth in time, to and fro in her subjects’ minds, Thora Pattern records the edge-of-the-alphabet lives of three people seen on a boat trip from New Zealand and in London after it.

Kiss in the Dark. Toby Withers, a hulking middle-aged epileptic, is given to holding little talks with his dead mother, compulsively wets his bed and picks his nose, afterward, as Miss Frame relentlessly reports, “peering curiously at the little blobs of salvage.” Irishman Pat Keenan talks in obsessive clichés about the threat of “foreigners and blacks,” is too troubled by nightmarish fear of the Blessed Virgin to get married. Ex-Schoolteacher Zoe Bryce broods endlessly upon her first kiss, which occurred when she was 37. It was perpetrated by an unshaven seaman who crept to her bed in the ship’s hospital, kissed her and disappeared unrecognized forever.

Racing off into poetry and surrealist invocations of death and decay and loneliness, Janet Frame’s story occasionally bogs down in unintelligibility, often seems tainted by abnormal morbidity. But as in her earlier books (Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water), she writes with power and makes the dismal fumblings of her creatures seem touching, compels the reader finally to accept as looming mountains the emotional molehills that are the topography of starved lives. Toby sustains a whole lifetime upon one moment of triumph: the time when his grammar school teacher read his paper on “The Lost Tribe” to the class. Awakened by the kiss, Zoe’s womanly urge to create something, anything, is fulfilled just once—when she twists some tinfoil into the semblance of a sculptured forest scene and is admired for it. “The communication of my life,” she sums herself up, “a kiss in mid-ocean between myself and a half-drunken seaman. The creation of my life—oh my God!—a silver-paper shape fashioned from the remains of an empty cigarette packet!”

As the book progresses, the message becomes clear—not new, but in this handling hard to shrug away. These poor creatures, isolated, inarticulate, fearful of showing their numbed feelings but more terrified still of dying without ever having been known to anyone, are vignettes of everyman—in foreboding miniature. In the prose-poetry of her alter ego, Author Frame asks her unanswered question:

Will Time publish us too as grotesque,

purposeless

beyond the range of human language . . .

turned and torn uncuriously by the

illiterate years

till our story is sealed at last

till no human mind remains to trace

the compelling reason,

the marginal dream?