A perceptive author in need of editing

KINFLICKS, by Lisa Alther; Knopf, 502 pp., $8.95.

By Alicia Metcalf Miller

Doris Lessing likes it very much. Erica Jong has already recommended it to dozens of friends. Vogue finds that it captures the social history of America in the third quarter of this century. Publisher Knopf has printed an almost unheard of (for a first novel) 35,000 copies before publication.

But the burden rests with the book. Unfortunately, it is a long way from being all it's cracked up to be.

An assault in sheer bulk, Kinflicks is the encyclopedic story, told in flashbacks, of a young woman's growing up in the 1950s and '60s, in the South and New England. The novel covers her life as a teen Cotton Queen, sweetheart of the high school football hero, motorcycle moll, budding college intellectual, lesbian lover, commune resident, wife of a Vermont snowmobile salesman, mother and, eventually, a failed adulteress.

Juxtaposed against Ginny Babcock Bliss's lengthy reminiscences are those of her mother who lies dying in a Tennessee hospital. Ginny has returned to her home town to be with her mother, though in fact she has nowhere else to go after been banished by her husband from hearth and child.

While Ginny pores over her childhood and young adulthood, Mrs. Babcock reviews her own parenthood. As strained and plotzy as Ginny's story is, Mrs. Babcock's is real and touching and written with such control that one wonders if these parts of the novel haven't wandered in from another book.

Mrs. Babcock laments that her three children are "flops," and that perhaps her life as a mother has been a wasted one. Ginny is indeed a flop, and a willful one at that. Even her attempted suicide after her mother's death turns into unredeeming slap-stick.

Kinflicks is an exhausting book. There are at least four or five times as much of it as its central subject merits. Lisa Alther can be perceptive and funny, but she undercuts her strengths by strenuously over-writing.

It is a pity that author Alther is left holding the bag of publisher's hype. Next time perhaps she'll be granted more skillful editing. Intelligent trimming would have done wonders for this often amateurishly cumbersome work. Buried inside Kinflicks is a lively and energetic (and much shorter) book just dying to get out.

Alicia Miller, a free-lance reviewer, looks through an endless flow of first novels for The Plain Dealer and tells of those that interest her.

Lisa Alther