INFERNO OF IRONY

FRANCINE PROSE'S NOVELLAS FOLLOW TWO HAPLESS ROMANTICS TO THE NETHERWORLD OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 19, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Books

But then that is the covenant of epiphany, which is always possible in Prose's fiction, though it usually arrives with some form of payback. The two novellas in ``Guided Tours of Hell'' are both true to their title: a couple of maelstrom descents that nonetheless manage to be irreverent, agonizingly personal and even very funny. Each concerns the perilous awareness that accompanies travel abroad, where (for Americans, anyway) every gesture can take on new and clumsy meaning, where every misgiving, so easily salved at home, has the potential to color an entire reality.

And poor, poor Landau. The solipsistic antagonist of the title novella, he's a lousy New York playwright who's come to Prague for a conference on Kafka. He's hoping his fictionalized little epistolary drama about Kafka and his tortured fiancee (``To Kafka from Felice'') will get a better reception here than it did at home, but even Landau couldn't help noticing that everyone fell asleep during his reading. Now he's boarded a bus with his colleagues to visit a concentration camp; searching for the appropriate metaphor to contain such agony, he can only think about how upstaged he feels. The star of the conference, a poet and camp survivor named Jiri Krakauer, is a white-haired testosterone king with the heart of a Primo Levi (or so he alleges) and the bellow of a lion. Next to Jiri, who insists upon giving his fellow travelers an I-was-there tour of the death camp, Landau is simply . . . well, what he already was. A profoundly self-involved, not very talented, immensely human guy.

Prose has made her Landau as comically deficient as a Philip Roth creation: plagued with a particularly Jewish brand of guilt and anxiety, awash in his own brooding insights about his own brooding mind. His self-awareness is cruelly unabating; reaching for noble emotions to go with the horrific facts of history he is witnessing, he instead must concentrate on baser truths: diarrhea (the Czech diet), envy (the testosterone king), lust (almost anyone will do). Landau's smallness is his burden, but it's hardly a rare trait -- some of that selfishness, as we know from the real Primo Levi, is what made for survival in the camps. Prose plays point-counterpoint with these grand and personal notions, finding within her dark satire a handhold for Landau -- who manages to emerge endearingly human, if not entirely heroic.

Black ha-ha in the aura of the death camps is not exactly an easy mood to strike, and occasionally I felt a tin quality to Prose's irony -- this story requires such a narrative distance that her characters began to feel caricatured. (When Landau loses his reading glasses in the camp, for instance, parallel to millions of myopic Jews before him, the moment felt more artificially literary than emotional.) This aloofness on the narrator's part is neither permanent nor crushing to the novella, but it reminded me of a coterie of analytic minds before Prose, including Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag -- sometimes in fiction, a dominant intelligence can get in the way.

The second, longer novella, ``Three Pigs in Five Days,'' evokes a different pain; it is less daring but more emotional. Nina, a lovesick travel writer who's been sent to Paris alone by her withholding editor-lover, is stumbling around in the kind of obsessive shadowland that every woman has wandered into at one time or another: Did Leo banish her to this awful hotel, a former French brothel, as a shorthand for ditching her? If she wanders onto the street without any destination to speak of, will everyone in Paris realize what an idiot she is? What difference can the Louvre possibly make, when the man she loves -- a controlling jerk, by the way -- doesn't love her back? Next to the great, now mythologized eros of Leo and Nina, Art and History wind up in the dustbin of global affairs -- no match for Nina's own emotions, her bruised memories of an afternoon roll in the hay.

The prison of self so consuming to Landau is the star of Nina's drama, too, but here it possesses a ragged maze that may lead to escape. After a few days of depressive sleep and propagandistic French television (hence the title), Nina finds Leo at her door -- and reality, subjective though it may be, replaces tortured fantasy. The passionate couple who before had anticipated each other's every move (or so Nina remembers it) now embark on a Paris escapade plagued by awkwardness and misunderstanding. Thanks to Leo's thumb-sucking pondering of Thanatos outdoing Eros, he leads Nina on what he's envisioned as a whimsical death tour: the catacombs, a couple of graveyards, the revolutionary prison where Marie Antoinette spent her last night. But Nina's own agenda, which ranges from Rodin's dirty drawings to Simone de Beauvoir's shrine, has already insinuated itself; much like the subconscious will take over in order to survive, Nina is fighting for air without even knowing it. Just when she begins to think she's losing her mind, she's on the verge of finding it.

There are a few dropped stitches in ``Three Pigs in Five Days,'' loose ends meant to imply Nina's wavering lack of reality but left dangling and unexplained. And sometimes Prose's exclamation-mark ironies start to sound shrill, when an alto-understatement would make the point far better. But Nina's story contains a pathos larger than the Nina-Leo show: Marching hand in hand with History, she is finally aided by it. Nina's life, too, possesses the same tragic non-tragedy as Landau's, though she may have more fight left in her by the end. Looking to Leo for her answers, she finds them instead in the French Revolution and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Myth doesn't show up every day to save us from ourselves; when it does, you'd be a fool not to listen.