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in the slammer with carol smith ++BY HORTENSE CALISHER ++MARIAN BOYARS ++252 PAGES ++FICTION BY SCOTT McLEMEE | the author of more than 20 volumes of fiction and essays, Hortense Calisher has a reputation as a "writer's writer." Meaning, above all, a stylist -- someone whose maneuvers are so inventive, supple and/or arcane that only readers similarly burdened with literary ambition are likely to appreciate the subtleties of her performance. Calisher's forte is the monologue. Situation and temperament, memories and verbal manner all refract one another, to reveal the depths of a character. "Herself" (1972) -- a reflection on how a writer's life and fiction interact -- is (that rarest of books!) an exceptionally intelligent memoir. And in an interview with the Paris Review, Calisher acknowledged how much she values "the freedom to be discursive, to trust that there will be readers who can accept long sentences, and long meanings." An academic critic has complained that reviewers of Calisher's work "invariably dive into the same adjectival pool and surface with a handful of epithets." And so must I to describe "In the Slammer with Carol Smith." Her latest novel really is "convoluted" and "dense" and "elliptical." The title character gradually puts together the pieces of her mind after a trauma; she wanders, practically homeless, through the streets of New York and between the fragments of her own personality. From sentence to sentence, Calisher's prose can make unusual demands on a reader's concentration. I only wish it rewarded the effort more consistently. Carol Smith's story unfolds through the nonlinear amblings of memory. Years ago, she was part of a group of student radicals -- poor little rich girls in Boston -- who decide to set off a bomb. While it is being assembled, Carol goes out to get everybody lunch. The bomb goes off accidentally. The survivors scatter. Carol alone ends up in jail and, later, at a psychiatric facility. At the start of the book, she is in a chemical daze, living on disability in a cockroach-infested New York apartment. She drifts around, and ends up apartment-sitting for a South African émigré. By the end of the book, Carol has reclaimed much of her lost self, and there is a chance that the two of them can begin a life together. Carol Smith's slender and difficult connection with the people around her, and with her own past, are artfully shown. The sentences link up in oblique ways -- just as the impressions on the narrator's mind do. For a dozen pages, it is dazzling. Twenty more, and it becomes tiring. Then, about halfway through the novel, comes a paragraph that belongs in some anthology of hopelessly overwrought prose: Down these old commercial blocks the hairy air is lion-colored, with tinsel sparks at the warehouse cornices. This is that other sunset the city gets no credit for. One the skyscrapers will never see. A slanting magic, folk art comfortable. Like I'm in the bowl of a worn but gilded spoon. Whereupon I had to put the book down for a while, until the pain subsided. That much purple is bad for the retina. July 23, 1997 Scott McLemee is a contributing editor at Lingua Franca. He writes regularly for Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html