BOOK REVIEW : Pale Tale Suffers Luckless Ending

The heroine of this wan novel--”Catching the Light,” by Susan L. Pope--is so blond and fair-skinned that “folks in North Osprey who didn’t know better called Damaris Bishop albino,” despite her intensely blue eyes.

Even folks who do know better might reasonably decide that Damaris’ physical pallor could be meant as a metaphor for her oddly affectless personality, since events that would precipitate passionate reaction in most people seem to leave Damaris virtually untouched. In many ways, she’s exactly like the beach glass she collects--bland and smooth; the color leached out, all jagged edges worn away.

Damaris was orphaned at the age of 3 when her parents were killed while on their way to an exhibit of glassworks. Left with her paternal grandparents by her glass-blower father and art-teacher mother, she has been dutifully brought up by them, a circumstance that sets her apart from her contemporaries. We’re told she’s rebellious, although even her rebellions seem curiously mild, like leaving a picnic without permission or hiding out in the back yard. When she’s a junior in high school, her revolt takes a somewhat more dramatic turn: She falls in love with a temporary resident of the town, a young man from a barren island off the coast of Maine who has taken a job with the same elderly glass blower who taught her father the craft.

Logan Perth is darkly handsome, artistic and extremely reticent; qualities Damaris finds irresistible. She trails him around the Cape Cod village, peers through the glassworks windows to watch him work, and eventually inveigles him out to her favorite marsh, the picturesque spot where her father proposed to her mother. There, she and Logan share wine, sandwiches and their DNA in what must be the most low-key love scene in contemporary fiction.

“It certainly is romantic,” he says, drawing her close.

A few weeks later, Damaris discovers she’s pregnant. She tells her grandfather, but chooses not to confide in Logan, who returns to his Penobscot Bay island unaware that the picnic on the marsh has had so significant an outcome.

Life in her grandparents’ farmhouse becomes untenable after Damaris refuses either to inform Logan or enter a Boston home for unwed mothers. Although this is 1960 and not a century earlier, her grandfather actually says: “Never cross my threshold again. The crossing of thresholds . . . that’s reserved for brides.”

Confronted with this ultimatum, Damaris drops out of high school and moves into Logan’s old room at Josie Santos’ boarding house, paying a tiny rent and helping out with the chores. She soon makes herself indispensable, while Josie, a warm-hearted Portuguese widow, supplies the understanding and support the Bishops couldn’t offer.

After an uneventful pregnancy, Damaris has an adorable little boy, who quickly becomes the darling of all the elderly residents. One of these, an ancient poet with a few secrets of her own, takes a special fancy to our heroine and decides Logan must know about his son. She writes to the father, and as a result, Damaris is invited by Logan to bring the baby to the island, a plan she acquiesces to as calmly as she’s done everything else.

The place is more wretched and primitive than she could possibly have imagined, and after her child almost dies of pneumonia, her passivity is replaced by determination. In short order, she returns to civilization, acquires a true, if somewhat eccentric, friend, and embarks upon a genetically determined career, one in which she, like the author, will need all the luck she can get.

CATCHING THE LIGHT by Susan L. Pope Viking $18.95, 226 pages

Next: Carolyn See reviews “A Bed by the Window” by M. Scott Peck (Bantam Books).