Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue

The first novel published here in a decade by the prolific and award-winning author (Malcom; In a Shallow Grave) is idiosyncratic and tantalizingly elusive. Chicago matron Carrie Kinsella is devastated by the death of her daughter Gertrude, a defiant and gifted painter contemptuous of her sheltered, unsophisticated mother. Neither Carrie's ailing, condescending husband (whom she deferentially and habitually addresses as ""Daddy"") nor her worldly and much-married sister-in-law, Gwen, is initially sympathetic to Carrie's quest to understand the daughter she never really knew. Carrie pores over the pages of her daughter's journal, a scrapbook of odd, sometimes salacious remarks about the men who posed for her paintings and often became her lovers. Her search leads her to other odd discoveries: her husband's own peculiar notes, a catalogue of yesterday's pop-culture minutiae called An Index of America's Forgotten Items; the seductive hospitality of the Spenser scholar Evelyn Awbridge and of Cy Mellerick, a golden youth who takes Carrie to her daughter's studio. As these glittering cicerones--so highly erudite, so studied in their dress and speech that a faint whiff of gothic parody surrounds them--lead Carrie deeper into the past, a novel that at first seems a relatively naturalistic narrative about loss and recovery becomes a richly detailed if somewhat diffuse allegory. Purdy alludes to Demeter's search for Persephone, imbuing Carrie's search with mythic resonance. Yet the turning point in the book--Carrie's confrontation of the sumptuous and brazen canvases in her daughter's studio--suggests that the American temperament epitomized by Carrie--provincial, philistine, repressed--needs art, needs music, needs sensual pleasure as an essential tonic. Certainly the carefully wrought pages of this novella will stimulate the patient reader. (Sept.)