Miss Lonelyhearts Meets the Feminine Mystique : DEAR DIGBY <i> by Carol Muske-Dukes (Viking: $16.95; 205 pp.; 0-670-82506-9) </i>

“Dear Digby,” the poet Carol Muske-Dukes’ first novel, makes its most obvious literary reference to Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts.” The impossible predicament of he, or in this case she, who must answer in print the painful cries de coeur of strangers is one of enduring interest. It’s a story with a built-in irony: that mortals can petition only other mortals to redress life’s wrongs. But the greater irony lies in the predicament of the respondent, who by definition is inadequate to the task. Inevitably, the story is his or hers.

Willis Jane Digby is the Letters editor for SIS (read Ms. Magazine), a glossy feminist bimonthly, whose staff biographies taken together read like a compendium of the women’s movement in its heyday. We learn immediately, from Digby’s first-person narration, illustrated by several of the spicier letters she receives (here termed “Ink Theater”), that a lot of the correspondence is from “crazy” people, many of them sexually fixated. (Where else would such people write but to SIS Magazine, forum for sexual politics, to discuss such matters as hypnotic rape, seminal fluid, and jock straps?) Of course, such letters are never actually printed in the magazine . . . that is, until Digby decides to intersperse them with the “you-are-doing-such-a-fine-job-for-women” and “write-your-congressperson-about-daycare” letters, written by the supposedly sane readers of SIS.

In both its structure, in which the lives of Willis Digby and two certifiably “crazy” people who regularly write her, meet, and in its expressed themes, the novel plays out the idea that we are all more or less crazy. As Willis Digby describes her column, “I see (it) as a kind of demilitarized zone where these two impulses--the desire of the sane to go crazy and the desire of the crazy to be sane--converge.” It turns out, as the editor’s own past is revealed through a series of flashback chapters that illuminate a particularly harrowing incident from childhood, and two later painful episodes of adulthood, that Digby has personal reasons for identifying with her “crazy” correspondents, the women in particular.

The brilliance of “Miss Lonelyhearts” lies in its disturbing redefinition of an American vocabulary. What we had called Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, freedom . . . was by another name, loneliness, alcoholism, the edge of madness. It is clear from her novel’s inscription, William Carlos Williams’ “The pure products of America go crazy--” that Muske-Dukes claims this same literary territory. But she does so, with a twist. This novel has an unmistakably female vision--both in its sexual politics and its ultimate insistence on community.

Muske-Dukes is a fine stylist. Her sculpted images and energetic prose make her storytelling vivid and compelling. Yet one wishes she had decided to write either a flat-out comic novel about the battle of the sexes, as narrated by a feminist survivor, or the more serious, psychologically acute story of a woman who responds to the pain and craziness in other people because of the pain and craziness in herself. The problem here is that the reader is asked to respond to Digby alternately as a stand-up comedian and as a character with a painful past. Her quite funny one-liners have the effect, at times, of undermining the reader’s identification with her predicament, which is really everyone’s.

See poem by Carol Muske-Dukes on Page 6.