LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGENESS

AMY BLOOM'S GENEROUS NOVEL OF IMPROBABLE HUMAN CONNECTIONS

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 12, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

The stories were striking enough to earn a place in two ``Best American Short Stories'' collections, in 1991 and 1992, and warrant a National Book Award nomination the next year; their author, we were told, was a practicing psychotherapist who divided her time between writing and listening. So it was easy to presume that ``Come to Me'' was the product of a bifurcated life -- her clients' gains would probably be, alas, her readers' loss.

I confess to harboring that presumption even more when I realized that Bloom's first novel, ``Love Invents Us,'' was drawn from one of the stories in ``Come to Me'': Good stories do not usually novels make, no matter how finely wrought the original product or how intelligent the attempts at conversion. It's a problem of form as well as tempo; a concerto, if constructed properly, isn't going to translate into a symphony.

Now I'm pleased to say I was wrong, for ``Love Invents Us'' is a lovely, harsh, reality-bound novel that has the elements of its earlier counterpart, linking together a collection of free-standing stories over the course of one character's life. In the original story, ``Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines,'' a young awkward girl in pink glasses feels herself transformed into someone beautiful and free -- for the few moments, anyway, when she undresses under the precious gaze of a middle-aged man. The incongruity between affect and action is what makes the story exceptional: In the nick of time, Mr. Klein pulls himself back from the murky underworld of molestation; the girl, fortified by the wrong kind of love, marches ahead to the other injustices that life inevitably promises.

In the wrong creator's hands (lacking compassion, say, or plain good sense), this point of view could be offensive or even pernicious, but Bloom makes her Mr. Klein a gentle man who stepped too close to a cliff, then didn't jump. Such generosity imbues Bloom's fiction, where nothing human is alien, where redemption is always living in a house one block over. The young heroine here, pink glasses and all, is renamed Elizabeth, and her clumsy encounter with Mr. Klein is her first -- and relatively benign -- foray into a world of reckless impulse and collision-course yearning.

Enduring a middle-class adolescence in the suburban Long Island of the 1960s and '70s, Elizabeth takes pleasure wherever she can find it: chocolate, shoplifting, crushes on teachers. A good Jewish girl who's bored out of her mind, she hears the strains of gospel outside a black church; that musical swoon takes her to Mrs. Hill, an ancient, half-blind black woman whose sweet wisdom is almost enough to protect Elizabeth. But not quite. First she has to dive headlong off her own share of cliffs: a preposterous affair with a teacher (see ``Semper Fidelis,'' in ``Come to Me''), an ensuing castabout life without any aim, a terror of loneliness that sends her back to all the wrong places. The one moment of pure righteousness in this young life is a tall, gorgeous, kind-hearted young basketball player named Huddie: ``Love and desire slammed us into each other,'' as Elizabeth puts it, ``giddy and harmlessly wild as bumper cars.'' But Huddie is black and Elizabeth white; the only place that doesn't care about such a detail in 1970 is lower Manhattan, where they occasionally escape to love each other out loud.

Such bumper-car innocence can't last, and Huddie is banished to Alabama by a furious father; Elizabeth's parents, having fulfilled their odd, distant destiny by divorcing, have hardly noticed. ``Guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar,'' Elizabeth tells us about her mother in the first few pages of the novel, and that laconic, unspiteful description is rich enough to paint a full-color portrait. The characters and emotional interiors of ``Love Invents Us'' are etched deliberately and in rough strokes; Bloom's is a minimalist style without a wasted adjective in sight. The payoff is subtle and large: By the time Bloom switched to a third-person narration, in part two of the novel, it came as something of a shock; I was so used to Elizabeth's street-wise, unilateral truthfulness that I thought she was talking straight to me.

The title of ``Love Invents Us'' is also its premise; allowing that idea to have a thousand interpretations, Bloom has written a daring little novel that turns the power differential of May-December exploitations on its head. (Of course, Nabokov indulged in similar bravery; Humbert Humbert never really has any authority.) But even the pathetic Mr. Stone -- first as Elizabeth's English teacher, then her adoring defiler -- is a fully realized, sorrowful guy. ``God,'' thinks Elizabeth, with merciful savvy, ``he taught me to drive a stick-shift, he taught me whole chunks of Auden, he made me listen to every kind of music.'' The sin of this father is visited mostly upon himself, and it is testament to Bloom's humanity that she has written this part of the novel with such insight and charity.

``Love Invents Us'' is a novel surfeited by reality: the truth about what really happens in a life lived somewhere in the vast middle, between melodrama and nothingness. When Bloom's story falters, it is in the moments of what seem to be willed aesthetic choices -- her blessed candor sacrificed for literary finery, or tidiness in fiction. This happens only rarely; when it does, one is conscious of just how clear the authorial voice mostly is here, singing alone without any accompaniment to mask the false notes.

And Elizabeth: She survives, makes the compromises we all make and dread and sometimes even welcome. ``I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night.'' However much that brief inventory rings with the softest note of sorrow, it will, for Elizabeth and for us, have to be enough.

AMY BLOOM, from ``Love Invents Us''