WHAT WOMEN WANT, AS SEEN BY NOVELISTS -- AND BY MARKETERS

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: N4

Section: Books

Theroux's essay is an excellent introduction to Collier, who died in 1980 and who would be best known, were he known at all, for having written the first script for ``The African Queen.'' ``I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer,'' he said toward the end of his life. This, of course, is nonsense, for whatever you may think of ``The African Queen'' (personally, I cannot get beyond my extreme aversion to Katharine Hepburn), ``His Monkey Wife'' is a work of genius. But Collier was an exceptionally modest man. More than that, he believed in the durability, relevance, majesty, and civilizing effect of Great Literature. According to Theroux, Collier's last project was to write a screenplay of Milton's ``Paradise Lost.'' ``I think,'' Collier said, his antennae picking up phantom signals from some golden age, ``the theme of `Paradise Lost' is singularly suited to attract a wide audience, and especially the young audience, of today.''

In this unworldly attitude he is at one with Emily, his monkey heroine. Being the pet of Alfred Fatigay, an English schoolmaster in Africa, she learns to read and in six months is ``tolerably conversant with most of the books that a mild idealist takes to the jungle these days, and on these, which help most of us forget that we are human, she founded her innocent theory of what human life should be.''

She accompanies Alfred, whom she secretly loves, back to England, where he hopes to marry his heartless fiancee. Despite the galling conditions of her life in England, Emily manages to round out her education at the British Museum Reading Room, becoming, among the hirsute scholars there, the toast of the tea room: `` `Here's to those bright eyes!' cried one, sluicing a steep wave of tea through the curved baleen of his moustache.'' To make a fairly short, brilliant story even shorter, suffice it to say that Emily finds a way to make an independent living, and her goodness, so amplified by her humanistic education, finally wins Alfred's heart, giving rise to one of the great romantic passages in literature: ``Into the depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash. She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle, guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of a prehensile foot, and darkness received, like a ripple in velvet, the final happy sigh.''

How very beautiful, I thought; and such delicacy! I closed my shabby, flaking copy a final time and began thinking: You know, really, this novel reminds me quite a bit of Arthur Golden's ``Memoirs of a Geisha'' (Knopf, $25). Emily is attractive to men because she is cultivated -- she is demure and modest, submissive and reserved -- and because she gives paramount importance to a man's requirements. This is all presented with exquisite irony by Collier -- but something like the same picture, minus the irony, is painted by Golden in his rendering of the world of the geisha.

``Memoirs of a Geisha,'' which strikes me as being accurate in every peculiar detail (indeed, Golden researched the matter thoroughly), is still a species of fairy tale. It's about a girl who is sold into slavery to be trained as a geisha. She is a brave little mite, resourceful and determined. Her life is made hell by a stepmother of sorts, a hideous crone, and by a poisonously beautiful proto-stepsister. She is saved by -- well, I won't say. Like Emily, she gives her heart to only one, seemingly unattainable, man and spends her life cultivating herself to be his worthy companion -- though there are no trips to the library for her.

Unlike Collier, Golden isn't after a good time in his novel; but he doesn't irradiate it with the fierce light of righteousness, either. Instead, he conveys what most people hereabouts would consider a reprehensible state of affairs calmly and convincingly, and even manages to get across the extent to which geisha were businesswomen possessed of considerable independence.

It is clear that Collier and Golden are both sympathetic to their main characters, but I am puzzled by what Lynn Freed thinks of Agnes La Grange, the central character of her novel ``The Mirror'' (Crown, $21). There is an unfortunate reason for this: Never was a novel so ill-served -- except, I dare say, in the small matter of sales -- by its packaging. Bad enough is the odor of nostalgia emitted by its rounded corners and bordered pages inscribed in an elderly, puce-colored typeface; but worse are the blurbists singing ``advance praise'' from various stations around the book. Five of the six seem to believe that Agnes is, as Linda Gray Sexton puts it, ``the sort of woman we all long to be.''

Oh, really? This is a woman who, though freedom-loving and strong-willed, to be sure, is pitiless and self-absorbed; a woman, moreover, who finds her greatest pleasure in anonymous sex with sailors. She has emigrated from England to South Africa after World War I and moves ruthlessly from the position of housekeeper to that of hotel owner. Her adventures, machinations, and sterilities smack of truth, and were I left to my own judgment I would have thought that her creator was ambivalent about her and had, in fact, successfully produced a nuanced work of fiction. But there's Bob Shacochis promoting the idea that this is a story of ``a woman's ascent toward strength and self-definition,'' and Andrea Barrett maintaining that it depicts ``what women really want.'' How sad and perfect an illustration this is of how literature about women exists these days in a polemical force field, one that makes a true depiction of human character in its insalubrious complexity an accomplishment to be kept under wraps.