The Perfect Place

Sheila Kohler

Alfred A. Knopf

148 pp. $15.95

THERE is a game some people play with their dogs. They hold a piece of food or a bone above the animal's head, tempting it, until the dog jumps up, ready to snatch the delicacy in its jaws. Then, these otherwise perfectly nice people yank the food away, out of reach, and the dog falls back to the ground, empty-mouthed.

Dogs, who are generally fairly stupid animals, will play this game for hours. Reading Sheila Kohler's first novel, The Perfect Place, is a lot like being the dog in this game.

Except, unlike dogs, the reader is likely to get pissed off at the game and walk away.

The book, although beautifully written, is a tease. And because the reader knows the outcome of the story from the beginning, the tease itself is a disappointment.

The problem is that Kohler has given her story too small a frame. The narrative is told in the voice of an older, wealthy woman, who has never married, has never needed to work and whose family members have apparently all died. She has no friends, and in fact is not connected to any person in any way.

The drama centers around the woman's inability to remember something that happened to a friend of hers after their graduation from a South African girls school. In fragments, the story of the woman and her lesbian affair with a schoolmate, Daisy Summers, is revealed.

But the reader is likely to feel trapped in this woman's mind as she agonizes over the memories. The reader's curiosity about what exactly happened wears out as the woman painstakingly and repetitively pieces the story together.

The woman herself is an interesting psychological study. She epitomizes what some people call the modern malaise--with her complete isolation from others and her self-absorption. Unfortunately, her character is so unattractive that it is difficult to read through a novel that does not leave her side for a moment.

The book agonizes with the woman. It obsesses with her. It is painful to read. It is suffocating.

KOHLER'S attempt to describe someone so unappealing and emotionless, and tell a story so difficult to relate, is admirable, but ultimately it fails. The reader is much more likely to give up than to continue to play her game, because the rewards--the details of the story--are doled out so agonizingly slowly.

And when the woman's complete story is finally revealed, in the last five pages of the book, the whole thing is so predictable and unworthy of such an immense build-up, it redefines the term "let down."