THE ART OF LIVING

MAUREEN HOWAR'DS TENDER, INTELLIGENT NOVEL OF NEW AND OLD LOVE, AND THE POWER OF MEMORY

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 4, 1998

Page: D1

Section: Books

Thanks to postmodern acrobats like Barth and Gaddis and Pynchon, intellectual fiction has fallen into disrepair, or at least out of favor, so that the mere suggestion of a novel of ideas can make an ordinary reader secretly shudder. Must I go there, you think, browsing among science and history, when all I require is a decent plot, revealed with a bit of realism and artistic grace? But Howard walks lightly in the footsteps of the older masters: Melville and George Eliot are the ghosts in her library, for she is more compelled by whale bones and wisdom than she is by wordplay or pyrotechnics. Each time I grew annoyed with ``A Lover's Almanac'' (puns like ``only correct'' and ``schlock of recognition'' were the worst offenders), I found myself righted by Howard's begrudging loyalty to old-fashioned story -- to that Wisconsin morning, once again, and to the coincidences of time and space that make one's life a life.

The central fiction of the novel is a love affair on the skids in pre-millennial New York, when on New Year's Day of the year 2000 Artie Freeman -- A. Freeman to us; artfree(AT SIGN SYMBOL) for e-mail -- awakes with a hangover. He recalls vaguely that he has hurt his lover, Louise Moffett, by his boorish behavior at their party the night before. A young and slightly fabulous painter who lives in a downtown loft, Louise is in the art scene, but not of it: She is corn-fed and deep as rain, a farm girl who fled her daddy's spread in Wisconsin to make real art in the unreal confines of the New York art world. Over and over, she paints the microscopic center of her past: huge reproductions of the cells of a leaf, or tiny, perfect postcard-landscapes of a vista that went on forever. She loves Artie -- it doesn't matter why -- and now he has stomped on her heart. That why doesn't matter, either.

What's important in ``A Lover's Almanac'' is its contractual affair between history and memory: the more public truths of the past rubbing up against the infinite emotional realities of its players. Through Artie and Louise, we are introduced to a thousand possibilities and a score of passionate missteps, junctures where a wrong turn or chance meeting defined the next 10 miles. And so we meet Artie's grandfather, Captain Cyril O'Connor, the heroic old man who watched his men die in Korea and has never celebrated a holy day since -- who lost his wife and daughter in the same year, then raised his grandson alone. We meet Sylvie Neisswonger Waite, an old love of Cyril's -- a Connecticut widow in her 70s now, though once she was the niece of the mayor of Innsbruck, a little girl who, nearly destroyed by Nazis, led her mother to freedom. We meet Louise's wonderful Aunt Bea, a middle-aged oncologist who used to ride a Harley, who roamed the back acres of the farm at night, singing up to the stars, ``WE ARE IN IT.'' And strolling through this four-dimensional landscape for our acquaintance are also Jefferson's ``Notes on the State of Virginia,'' Mendel's peas, Franklin's diaries, applied mathematics, and an old blue taffeta dress, which seems to have traveled widely in New York.

Because the real hero in ``A Lover's Almanac,'' the real survivor, is the searing afterlife of memory -- ``memory that has outlasted pain.'' Sylvie knows this, and Cyril knows it, too, but they can't teach it to Artie and Louise -- young lovers who first must live through the hurt to reach the other side of hope. Taking as its scaffolding the seasonal hocum and promises of ``The Old Farmer's Almanac,'' Howard's novel zigzags between cyberspace and long-ago lost wars, between, say, Henry Adams's visions and Harold Moffett's cows. The real connecting infrastructure, though, is the authorial intelligence, roving with a kind of sweet insouciance among science and art, past and future, as though Maureen Howard were simply killing a Sunday morning at a flea market of ideas. Our Lady of Rag-tag Hope and Eternal Consequence.

If ``A Lover's Almanac'' calls to mind anything in recent fiction, it's probably E. Annie Proulx's ``Accordion Crimes'' or Richard Powers's ``Galatea 2.2'' -- both novels dominated by friendly in-your-face narration, both aglow with the chaos of ideas and the palpable proof of the heart's reach. In her post-it love note to history and memory, Howard relies on the silent courage of Cyril and Sylvie, the witty gravitas of Aunt Bea -- who, scientist to the end, relies in life and lab alike on the laws of Newton: ``If we slip, we fall.''

Is it too much, this anagram of insights posing as a novel? ``A Lover's Almanac'' is dense and dazzling, but what it accomplishes in wisdom and street smarts it sacrifices in character and plot. That trade-off won't bother some readers, for there are tributaries of connective depth here that are more than worth the stone-skimming attention to cast. Maureen Howard is more interested in the grand design that links her characters than the characters themselves; in a welcome swipe against the invisible narrator of so much contemporary fiction, this one is trying to take over entirely. What justifies that bullying act is the novel's occasionally rapturous prose: Just when you've wearied of another show-off clause or detouring diatribe, Howard will deliver writing of such gorgeous proportion as to make you gasp.

Wandering vagabond of the newly 21st century, Artie Freeman suffers his own search for the truth, until he finally learns the great lesson of both mathematics and life -- that the point is to love and live with no guarantees, that ``the problem was beautiful without its solution.'' Like the old farmer's guide it seeks to emulate, ``A Lover's Almanac'' offers riddles and forecasts, ludicrous ideas and bracing potions. And yet the most beautiful passage in the novel ends with a petition not to the stars or the seasons but to Beckett: ``Go on. We go on.'' It suggests the sway and allure of this graceful choreography that Maureen Howard could plot the celestial coordinates on the beginning day of ``A Lover's Almanac,'' then land, feet first, on a modern mountain peak that knows no weather at all.