DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9710230676

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LYNN HUNTER 

                                            LENGTH:   62 lines

A WOMAN'S WILLPOWER TRIUMPHS

SARAH CONLEY

ELLEN GILCHRIST

Little, Brown. 260 pp. $23.95.

``Nature does what she goddamn well wants to do, and we can just pick up the pieces,'' explains the protagonist of Sarah Conley, Ellen Gilchrist's new novel about nature, nurture and narcissism. ``But I can't pick them up. . . . It would do no good. Nothing I could do would be enough. I would end up being a dumping ground and I won't be in nature's plan. I'm in my own plan.''

As the book begins, Sarah Conley leaves her office at Time magazine to fly to Nashville, Tenn., for a deathbed visit. Eugenie, her beloved girlhood friend, is dying. From the first, the reader is carried by Gilchrist's mesmerizing prose. After receiving news about Eugenie's prognosis:

``She opened a drawer and got out a package of cigarettes, and carrying them in her hand, she left the office and went down to the street floor and out onto the street and stood in the doorway shivering.''

The rhythm of language, almost as regular as breathing, conveys strong emotion. The sequence of small, routine activities reveals a sense of shock. By the end of this single sentence, readers are able to feel the emotional impact of the wintry last word - ``shivering.''

In Nashville, Sarah reviews her past, attempts to make amends, and encounters some problems too big to fix - chiefly those caused by being in love with Eugenie's husband, Jack.

Sarah's character is vintage Gilchrist: a willful woman making the world work her way. Yet, Sarah Conley is not as engaging as Gilchrist's other fiction. Perhaps this is because Sarah is difficult to like. She is absorbed in contemplating her own love life, work and what she wants. The death of Eugenie simply sets the stage for Sarah to straighten out her own desires. Does she want to break up with her lover? Does she want to go to Paris and write a screenplay? Does she want to keep her job at Time? How will she divert the needs of other people?

When Elise, Eugenie's architect daughter, turns to her Aunt Sarah in grief, Sarah gives her $80,000 to redo the empty Conley farmhouse. When she is sure that Jack is free and interested in her, she rids herself of her longtime live-in lover. ``My God, I'm glad he's gone,'' she tells herself.

Conventional writing wisdom holds that readers should be able to care about characters - if not love them, at least care what happens to them. If deeper compassion can't be expected of this character, considering the plot, Sarah might be made more palatable with a dose of unvarnished honesty, like Rhoda's in Gilchrist's novel Age of Miracles: ``I don't know what I want but I know how to get it.''

Gilchrist, a Mississippian, lives in Fayetteville, Ark., and Ocean Springs, Miss. Like the characters in Sarah Conley, Gilchrist waved her pom-poms as a high school cheerleader and attended Vanderbilt University. Sarah Conley is her 15th book. Her first story collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, appeared in 1981. Gilchrist's novels (New of Jewels, Courts of Love, The Annunciation) and inter-related short-story collections (Drunk with Love, The Age of Miracles) have attracted a devoted readership. Her 1984 collection, Victory Over Japan, received the National Book Award. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer and poet and associate

fiction editor of ``The Crescent Review.'' She lives in Virginia Beach.

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