AIMING FOR SERIOUSNESS, `OYSTER' GETS LOST

Author: By Jodi Daynard

Date: SUNDAY, March 22, 1998

Page: G2

Section: Books

The plot is initially intriguing. Two young adults disappear from a religious cult in the outback of Australia, in the fictional town of Outer Maroo. The cult, located on Oyster's Reef, is headed by a David Koresh-like sociopath named Oyster. When Nick and Sarah, two ``foreigners,'' come looking for their lost children, their presence in Outer Maroo shakes the town's delicate calm, setting in motion a fatal string of events.

Outer Maroo is literally off the map of Western Queensland. It is a place plagued by malodorous winds, a place where opal grows thick in the soil, fermenting human greed, and where the rules of civilization -- rules that might keep such greed in check -- just don't apply.

Of course, the literal stench of Outer Maroo is meant to represent its moral decay, and in this respect Hospital's description of her setting is well done. With its putrescent heat, eccentric townsfolk, and unhealthy isolation, Outer Maroo evokes an eeriness reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, the kind in which we know that everyone is implicated in a terrible evil but not what this evil might be.

But in ``Oyster,'' even the lure of the unknown becomes wearying after awhile. Who is guilty, and of what? Does the cult still exist, and if so, what is it like? We almost never see the novel's antihero or his cult, just those rough townsfolk skulking around on its periphery. And the novel's many temporal shifts add to the confusion. Thus, the tension the novel's plot creates is not so much suspense as irritation: When will the narrative fog clear?

What little we do know comes thanks to Mercy Given, the 16-year-old cult victim through whose eyes we glean both past and present events. Mercy is an interesting character, though also a bit opaque. She seems wimpy and determined by turns. Mainly, she wants to leave Outer Maroo, and in the course of the novel's events, endeavors to find the strength to do so.

In theme and texture, ``Oyster'' is meant to be a serious work on a serious theme: the human capacity for evil. Indeed, with its shifting points of view, interiorized voices, and stream-of-consciousness italic passages, ``Oyster'' mimics the modernist literary novel -- like ``Heart of Darkness'' as it might transmogrify itself in our own post-Jonestown, post-Waco era. But if the definition of a ``serious'' novel is that it ring true to something -- true to its story, its characters, to human nature -- then ``Oyster'' doesn't fit, because nearly everything in it rings false.

Let's begin with its abundance of bad metaphors: Mercy can be found ``brushing words off her clothes,'' or studying ``the wraith of words that float above the table cloth, that skirmish with the knives and forks, that ribbon their way between the chairs.'' Or, retreating from a tense family meal into the kitchen, Mercy ``devotes herself to details, she lets the details make as much noise as they please.'' In these instances and elsewhere, abstractions are personified to nearly laughable effect. Then there's the false dialogue. Nearly everyone in this novel stutters with anxiety, as if people withholding evil truths, or suspicious of them, must speak in ellipses. For example, a nervous Sarah -- who has moved in with Mercy's family -- speaks to them ostensibly about Outer Maroo's extremes of temperature: ``How . . . how awful,'' she says, ``that's even more . . . I can't seem to follow the logic of the climate here, the rules all seem haywire. . . .''

One might forgive a novel that suffers from external flaws, but ``Oyster'' suffers from a false interior as well, particularly in the way characters react -- or fail to react -- to the story's increasingly violent events. Take, for example, the moment when Mercy has just been in an accident in which someone has died. She herself is seriously injured, but Hospital has her thinking about her bloodied body in terms of the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat: ``Pointillism, she thinks fiercely, and for a moment the burning sensation that she wears like a body glove is soothed, but only for as long as she can hold the vowels inside her mouth.''

Even worse is the steam of repressed female sexuality that seems to waft continually out of nowhere. In one scene, Mercy observes Sarah eyeing Nick: ``She has a radical distrust of men like that. She does not like him. . . . She can taste him on her lips.'' (Oh, puh-leeze.) Finally, the author displays a penchant for bad jokes and double entendres, a kind of nervous tic that grows worse as the book progresses. It's bad enough that all the characters have been given allegorical names like Mercy Given, Major Minor (for an opal digger), and Suzannah Rover (Mercy's former teacher, who has also disappeared, and to whom she perpetually calls, ``Miss Rover, Miss Rover, come over''). Or that ``Shafted'' is the title of the chapter in which Mercy is sexually abused in an opal mine shaft.

But I confess I finally threw this book across the room when the author sank to Oyster jokes, even if they're purportedly told by Outer Maroo's townspeople (weren't they just a little too busy being evil, or scared, to yuk around?). Such serious flaws from an otherwise accomplished novelist suggest that perhaps the author's interest in her subject was only skin deep. Maybe something about the events at Waco piqued her curiosity, got her thinking about a ``concept.'' But novels are not made out of concepts; they are made out of flesh and blood -- or must at least create this illusion. Fiction can't survive a minute in the arid environment of intellect without feeling.

Ultimately, the problem with ``Oyster'' is that it lacks heart, which one might define as a genuineness of feeling on the author's part toward her story. A story told with heart will make a reader forgive many flaws in the telling. In a novel without heart, on the other hand, nothing grows beneath the dry cover of words. No feelings take root. Without heart, a novel will either leave you cold, or worse -- it will make you laugh when you're not supposed to. And so one cautions: Wise Reader, fish elsewhere. This ``Oyster'' yields no pearl.