29 JANUARY 1983, Page 24

Melodrama

Francis King

A Bloodsmoor Romance Joyce Carol Oates (Cape £9.95)

Aways ambiguous in aim and often wavering in execution, this is a rum book to come from one of the best and best-known of modern American women writers.

Some 600 closely printed pages in length and covering a period from 1879 to the birth of the 20th century, it recounts the various calamities which befall an inventor of genius, John Quincy Zinn, his patrician wife, their four natural daughters and their one adopted one. Due to his negligence in securing patents, it is Zinn's fate to have most of his discoveries — the zip, the typewriter, the incandescent bulb, the phonograph — appropriated by Thomas Alva Edison and other competitors more greedy for fame and pelf than he is; but at least he receives the credit for having in- vented the electric chair — which, as he originally conceives it until his wife changes his mind, is to be an electric bed. Having spent all his adult life in search of perpetual motion, it is only on the approach of death that he finds it within his grasp, in the form of an unending nuclear explosion; but, perhaps luckily for posterity, his work- sheets are destroyed.

Of his four daughters, the adopted one, Deirdre, is mysteriously spirited away in a balloon, later to emerge as a world-famous medium, known as 'Deirdre of the Shadows'. One natural daughter, Malvinia, flees home to become another Adah Isaacs Menken, until a combination of drink and `unwomanly' sexuality drives her off the stage; another, Constance Philippa, also vanishes, to pop up with a male identity in the Wild West. Octavia enters 'a respec- table Christian marriage', only to find that her seeming sobersides of a hus&and makes increasingly bizarre demands of her in the conjugal bed. Samantha, at first her father's assistant, elopes with a man beneath her station, to endure a life of too many children and too little cash.

In the manner of Doctorow's best-selling faction Ragtime, the lives of these im- aginery characters keep becoming entangl- ed with those of real-life ones. Zinn has his portrait painted by John Singer Sargent and is not merely dogged by Edison's spies but is also admired and wooed by Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists. Malvinia at first attracts Mark Twain, as did Adah Isaacs Menken in real life, but then repels him with the frenzy of her lovemaking. Deirdre, at the outset of her career as a medium, becomes the protegee of Madame Blavatsky. In her new identity

of 'Philippe Fox', Constance Philippa meets such Wild West personalities as John Chisum, Reb Kingston and Hank Willis.

In telling this tale, so crammed with melodramatically improbable happenings, the author never makes clear how seriously she wishes to be taken. The section headings (`The Passionate Courtship', 'The Yankee Pedlar's Son', 'Adieu! 'Tis Love's Last Greeting' etc) and the whimsical ar- chaism of the style both suggest that she is attempting a pastiche, if not an outright, parody, of the three-decker novels produc- ed by once famous but now forgotten queens of the circulation libraries. But un- fortunately pastiche (or parody) is something for which she has little natural talent. 'Divers' for 'various', 'beauteous' for 'beautiful', 'thusly' for 'thus', 'oftly' for 'often', 'dm', for 'though', 'clarksome' for 'dark', 'healthsome' for 'healthy': these keep recurring, in an attempt to establish period, just as the snuff-box, the peruke, the patch, the eye-glass, `Zounds' and `Pshaw' keep recurring in the historical romances of her less famous literary sisters, with as little effect.

My guess is that, like Fielding in the case of Joseph Andrews, Miss Oates began her book in a spirit of mockery, which was then increasingly dissipated in the fever of crea- tion. As her previous writings have repeatedly demonstrated, her story-telling gift is such that she can make the most banal or improbable of happenings absorb the reader. This is precisely what occurs here. The inordinate length of the book and its tone of heavy playfulness — as of Henry James footing it with the fairies at the bot- tom of his garden in Rye — induce a numb- ing lethargy, from which the reader is then aroused by the bravura of passages such as those which describe Malvinia's disastrous encounter with Mark Twain and Deirdre's triumphant one with the Society for Psychical Research.

Near the close, Miss Oates has begun to take her novel so seriously that she even suggests, in her persona of a devout, prudish, palpitating Victorian lady-novelist of uncertain years, that its intention is allegorical. If one accepts this, then Zinn represents the practical and inventive male genius of the 19th century and his wife and daughters its female frustrations, yearnings and rebellions. The garrulous cosiness and coyness of the style, even when dealing with such subjects as adultery, lesbianism, sado- masochism, murder and the occult, may also then be taken as part of the allegory of a society in which there yawns a constant gulf between what is acknowledged and what happens, between the upstairs and downstairs of the psyche.

Like her medium Deirdre, through whose maidenly personage a host of people noisily compete to deliver their messages to the world, Miss Oates, a kind of literary Niagara, words never ceasing to tumble out of her in thunderous, misty cascades, is cer- tainly a phenomenon of nature.