BOOK REVIEW : A Saga of Screaming, Crying and Sulking : WORLDS BEYOND MY CONTROL, <i> by Jane Lazarre</i> , Dutton, $17.95, 192 pages

Jane Lazarre here creates a novel/journal/memoir about “Julia,” a “woman who writes/a woman who does not write.”

Julia lives in New York with her husband, Bruce, and their two sons, Daniel and Anthony. Bruce is black. Julia’s roots are Jewish. She comes from a radical background. Her own mother died young, after a harrowing three-year illness. There’s some suggestion that young Julia was schizophrenic. She was plagued by inner voices and strange physical sensations.

These stories--or story fragments--are written down as Julia suffers several traumas: She has lost her best friend, Martha, who now loathes Julia. She no longer writes. She’s going through premature menopause. She looks forward to the wrenching pain of saying goodby to her boys as they go off to college.

But, as the British might say, she makes rather a meal of it: “I am constructing a tapestry of dark, thick, layered words to ward off dangers, and my accomplishment will never last much longer than the ephemeral relief of completing a final page.”

And, again, “I sit down at the table wishing I could drop the whole thing, the masks of motherhood, the burdens of art.” I can only say: She doesn’t wish it half as much as her beleaguered reader.

It’s hard to “criticize” this book, because it’s “politically correct” with oak leaf clusters. Who would have the nerve to take exception to the historic sorrows of the Jewish people, the terrible injustices of American slavery and its hideous aftermath, the sacred female tasks of marketing, cooking, nursing the sick, raising the children and so forth?

Who could be so cold and callous as to turn from a book that invokes New York rats scurrying in squalid subways, New York homeless bedding down in uncaring shelters, crazy young women screaming in freezing rain in desperate New York streets, and, if that’s not enough, every time you turn on the television, some innocent South African poet getting executed?

Julie lives a taxing and claustrophobic life. She screams incessantly at her kids, and floats the proposition--if I read correctly--that this horrid domestic din is directly connected to her power to speak out as a writer. Her kids scream back. And then they cry.

Everyone is always crying in this book! They bicker, sulk, slam doors, cry, yell. Looking back through these pages, this family doesn’t own one family joke, one fleeting family laugh. No one ever smiles.

“Worlds Beyond My Control” reads like a nightmare, and one doesn’t want to put a politically incorrect spin on this. It’s just the tone , and the sense that all art is suffering, all motherhood is suffering, all manhood is suffering. The whole damn thing is suffering!

Vomiting and nightmares--those two pastimes are Julia’s main activities, besides screaming and writing. (Is this really what it means to be a woman--to be monstrous, unloved, a pain in the neck to yourself and to everyone around you? Do women have to indulge in panic attacks, constant nagging, waiting up for their children, driving those children absolutely bananas, and then complaining about the process?)

In places, this seems like a parody by Bruce Jay Friedman or Woody Allen. Having a mother like Julia would be enough to convert you to the Republican Party, develop a wholesome interest in limited war, sign up for golf lessons; anything, anything to get out from under these horrid female entanglements.

A few interesting things here: Those poor boys, Daniel and Anthony, never bring a friend home during this book. They never go to a ballgame or a prom. That husband never goes out, or works late, or brings home a friend, or gives any sign at all of living a life outside these claustrophobic walls.

And Julia herself has only two friends, one of whom she sells down the fictional river by writing about their one-night lesbian stands.

I have trouble understanding this book. Julia is presented here as sympathetic, even profound. The art of “female” writing is examined and seen as inextricably combined with motherhood, menopause and so on.

I disagree, I disagree, I disagree. I have to believe it’s possible to write a thousand words a day without screeching and weeping and vomiting. I must say that, although it makes me politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “Wings for My Flight: The Peregrine Falcons of Chimney Rock” by Marcy Cottrell Houle (Addison Wesley).