THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508240729
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
HUNTERS AND GATHERERS
FRANCINE PROSE
Farrar Straus and Giroux. 247 pp. $20.
The title of Francine Prose's latest novel, Hunters and Gatherers, refers to a goddess cult that tries to get back to primitive times. Yet the cult's members - one is the chief executive officer at a fragrance company, another is a world-famous artist, several are university professors - are anything but primitive.
An award-winning author of nine novels (including Household Saints, which was made into a film) and two short-story collections, Prose writes like a poet. She puns, gives her words double meanings and has a talent for irony.
She also has a penchant for the supernatural. Known for mixing the rational and the irrational, she suggests Isaac Bashevis Singer. But where Singer is tender, Prose is rough. She makes fun of her characters and what they do - building them up with one sentence and belittling them with another.
Hunters and Gatherers protagonist Martha, for instance, is a literal-minded, fact checker for Mode, an upscale fashion magazine. Her appearance contradicts her position: ``a pale twiglike body. . . and newly hatched duckling Mercurochrome orange hair.'' Her huge black eyes are ``all pupil, like those of some sort of lemur or sloth.''
With those eyes, Martha sees herself as an outcast, and she sees her job as ``boring, underpaid, and demeaning. . . pointedly symbolic of what she most despised in herself: her starchy liberal-mindedness, her unintuitive narrowness.''
As the story begins, Martha, who has been jilted by her lover, Dennis, rests on a deserted stretch of beach feeling the scrutiny of an unseen eye.
In a sense, the eye is the glaring sun; it is also Martha's inner eye. In another sense the eye is a symbol suggesting the meaning of the story, which is about a vision quest. Moreover, nothing much will happen in the story, but what does happen will expand Martha's vision. All of which suggests one of the novel's themes: It's not what happens; it's how you see what happens.
It's also how you talk about what happens, as Martha learns when she meets the members of the cult. These women have names like Diana, Freya, Titania, Sonoma and Isis Moonwagon. They call their seminary an ``ovulary,'' sprinkle their conversations with the phrase, ``Blessed Be.'' They sit in healing circles, sweat in sweat lodges, speak when handed a ``Talking Stick,'' and try to avoid what they see as patriarchal and phallo-centric.
There are ironies within ironies in Prose's world. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that those ironies are at times delivered with a heavy hand.
The high point occurs in an Arizona desert where the women pursue the vision quest and visit a sweat lodge. Here Prose shines at her ironic best, as she allows her characters' conflicting viewpoints to emerge:
Rita, the medicine woman, describes the sweat lodge as ``the hamburger of the Native People's spiritual life. But we say that the vision quest is the filet mignon.''
Sonoma, the adolescent daughter of one of the women, describes the lodge as: ``Everybody sweaty and naked. Yuck. Cellulite and drippy underarm hair.''
Isis Moonwagon, the high priestess, talks about being guided through ``every avatar of the divine, from the growling dogs guarding hell to the highest Athena mind.'' Then she compares the experience to driving through a rush-hour subway: ``Lights were whipping through the air: the special effects were amazing.''
The women never actually have visions. But at the story's end, the plot takes an unexpected turn. Martha arrives at a realization that may be as old as the hills, but Prose's telling is fresh. MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson State
University in Maryland. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
by CNB