The Menagerie of a Midwife : COZ <i> by Mary Pjerrou (Spinster/Aunt Lute Book Co., P.O. Box 410687 San Francisco, CA 94141: $9.95, paper; 240 pp.; 0-933216-70-X) </i>

All praise for Mary Pjerrou’s refusal to settle for the timid, the constrained, the narrow canvas of a safe first novel. Instead, she tries to corral within these pages a menagerie of ideas about feminism and Gnosticism and Hawking’s time paradoxes and to yoke them all to a personal story of damage and healing. It’s that huge ambition, I believe, that led the Mendocino Festival of Books to award “Coz” its 1989 prize. But only the very greatest of writers have the imaginative and intellectual force to make this kind of novel compelling and coherent; sadly, Pjerrou is not yet one of them.

The narrator is Abby, a midwife on Only Mountain--a setting purposely abstract, unconnected to any real place. Abby once loved a man who spurned her and became a priest. To punish him, she sterilized herself, but when she saw the work he dedicated his life to--ministering to the wretched of the Earth--she became a midwife to atone for cutting off “God’s gift of life.”

The fantastic events Abby relates already have transpired, and now she’s trying to find meaning in them. Called to assist at the birth of the 13th child of one of Mick Grady’s wives, she finds the Grady clan a polygamous patriarchy and Grady himself the creator of an oddball religion that is a “hybrid flower of the patriarchal imagination based on Genesis and astronomy.” Somehow, Grady progeny soon will populate the stars. Meanwhile, on Only Mountain, chaos--literal and symbolic--reigns among the Gradys. Goats stampede through the house, wives and children teem, and everywhere is unspeakable filth.

One of the book’s first problems is that Mick Grady doesn’t ring true. Angry, self-absorbed, this quintessential male chauvinist has no charisma, no likabililty. The reader wonders what holds all these wives and grown children to him. He’s here, it seems, only to symbolize male dominance.

Counterpoised against Grady and his clan is old Coz, an aged “witch” as the Gradys call her, who lives on the mountain and who recently has “unbirthed” a baby--a man who had adopted her as a child, grew old with her, then reversed the aging process until he became a mewling infant. Coz grew an umbilical cord and placenta and unbirthed him. Now Coz announces that she herself will go backward in time and that Abby has been chosen as her “precessor,” the woman who will unbirth Coz.

Aside from the ultimate unreality of this reversal process, which even in context never seems less than absurd, there seems to be no logical reason why Abby--not particularly admirable or sympathetic--among all the women in the world should be chosen for this momentous task. For this unbirthing, Coz explains, is to have cosmic consequences. It will, at once, propel Mick Grady and his progeny to the stars from where their descendants will populate the universe (although that may well be one of Coz’s lies). It also will usher in the beginning of a 2,000-year period during which Abby will live and grow wise, and then perhaps more “children of the earth” will be taken to the stars.

As must be obvious by now, this plot is extremely difficult to follow. In part, that’s because far too much of it is carried by talk. Not dialogue, talk. Coz discloses and explains and changes her story and expounds upon the universe and time ad nauseam. There is much speechifying about how going backward in time is closer to the natural order of things, but that dubious case is never proved. Abby and the man who is supposed to “unfather” (i.e. have sexual intercourse with Abby after the unbirthing) Coz argue and discuss incessantly.

Another difficulty in following the book’s spine lies in the often impenetrable language and Faulknerian sentences of these conversations, particularly when Coz expatiates. “After I am unborn of Abby,” Coz says, “Dr. Kingman will unfather me. As he is now going backward, this double negative will stop my undoing, and will then bring you home to the universe chosen for you. Dr. Kingman will resume his forward-going life and become one of you, carrying with him the seed of travel which will be passed on to future generations through his children and will eventually recover its power like a recessive gene. . . .”

Ultimately, a long overdue assertion of independence by the Grady women, just before Coz--now an infant--is to be unbirthed by Abby, destroys the plan. Remarkable events occur, which one either accepts in context or doesn’t. Once again, for me they fail to convince.

It’s a bad sign when you keep asking yourself why certain things are happening and not getting an answer, when motivations are unclear, when plot strands seem to want to be related but don’t quite make it. I admire Pjerrou for her seriousness of purpose and her long reach, but for me ‘Coz’s’ reach far exceeds its grasp.