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."

Kohler's novel originated as a short story and was included in the 1988 collection of O. Henry awards. In its shorter version, I am sure this psychological drama was outstanding, but as a novel the story is stretched too thin.

Kohler should have kept her work in a shorter form, because her writing at times is lovely. The central character, who is as obsessed with places as she is careless towards people, describes the countryside of the three nations beautifully. With her focus on light, the landscapes are drawn like Impressionist paintings.

In the mountains, before tedium sets in for the reader, the woman paints Switzerland as only a privileged old woman could:

The people are courteous, of course, but frightfully dull, and the whole place has always looked somehow "preserved" to me, rather like pickles in a jar. And too many cows, I always say, there are just far too many cows.

And in Italy, as the narrator approaches her final revelation, the light darkens:

The sky was still blue, but the land had caught the shadow, and the sea looked almost dark. Dark shadows blackened the water, and the lights of the harbor were lit and shimmered on the surface of the sea like oil. All the substance began to run from the colors; finally, only the black of the shadows and the white of the lights remained.

BUT the wonderful sense of place and the narrator's eye for details soon become monotonous. The affair the woman has with one of her teachers, and even her borderline incestuous relationship with her mother, are described so coldly, so myopically that it is difficult for the reader to understand or sympathize.

The author, it seems, has made the same mistakes of her central character--she has detached the novel from any kind of explicit emotion so much that the drama is buried, and the reader feels her character is almost irrelevant.

The game with the dog depends on the stupidity of the animal and also its desire for the reward. In The Perfect Place, the reader is too smart to waste the time, and the reward--the final story--is so unworthy that it is unlikely many readers will continue to play the game for long.

Unfortunately, Kohler's writing skill is lost in the game.