A Realist of Distances : CABIN FEVER, <i> By Elizabeth Jolley (HarperCollins: $19.95; 224 pp.)</i>

Flannery O’Connor once made an observation that holds especially true for Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley, whose work in some ways resembles hers. “The maximum amount of seriousness,” she said, “admits the maximum amount of comedy.”

It is exactly this unsettling combination of seriousness and comedy that makes Jolley’s tone so difficult to pin down and prompts her reviewers so often to adjectives of puzzlement: distorted, zany, idiosyncratic. In fact, Jolley, one of the preeminent novelists writing in English today, is what O’Connor would have recognized as “a realist of distances,” that is, a writer who sees near things along with their extensions of meaning and thus, also, sees far things close up.

“I have seen the world and my own life,” remarks “Cabin Fever’s” heroine/narrator, a middle-aged clinical psychologist, “from one narrowed day to the next, from cramped week to cramped week, at ground and hedge-root level, unable to see anything beyond the immediate.” There it is, up front: the note of authentic seriousness that announces, in Jolley, that “beyond the immediate” is going to be of central importance through out.

And it always is, however obliquely intuited. But cheek by jowl with it is always the equally authentic note of comedy, the world’s deflating innocence that puts the eternal verities in perspective. “People come to see me,” says the psychologist. “Consulting, it is called. . . . What about? they ask. What do people consult you about? they ask. I tell them people want to ask about things which worry them. Like what? they ask. What sort of things and do they have to take their clothes off? they want to know.”

This small, fraught marriage of the sublime and the ridiculous is something that Elizabeth Jolley has been putting through a refining fire for some years now, achieving over time a clarification of purpose and control of tone missing from earlier novels, like the sad, splendid “Mr. Scobie’s Riddle” or the fey and somewhat mystifying “Foxybaby.”

Yet the seeds of her most recent work, right down to specific images and character types, are all there from the beginning, unfolding and blossoming from one novel to the next, as if this curious, shape-changing life of ours were a single, great, many-faceted mystery that she is determined to get to the bottom of before she dies.

“Cabin Fever” is Jolley’s 11th novel and--along with “My Father’s Moon,” to which it is the closely related sequel--one of her best: sharply observed, heart-rendingly funny, profoundly serious. “My Father’s Moon” is the coming-of-age story of Veronica Wright, a young girl from the English Midlands who, after some years in boarding school, goes off during World War II to train as a nurse. In her loneliness, she is swept off her feet by the slyly charming Dr. Metcalf, a relationship that comes to no good end, as we might have guessed but know in any case from the novel’s opening scenes, in which Veronica is setting off with her small daughter to take a job as a domestic at a Hertfordshire boarding school.

The fascinating thing about “Cabin Fever” is that it tells essentially the same story, but the main difference is one of perspective:

In “Cabin Fever,” the narrator is now a middle-aged psychologist whose obsessive recollections are brought on by an attack of claustrophobia, or “cabin fever,” in a New York City hotel room. We have no idea what happened to the daughter or how Veronica got from her position as a hopelessly vulnerable, poverty-stricken single mother in postwar England to her present circumstances as a well-off professional woman whose job is to console other people. (Perhaps Jolley has planned a trilogy.) But we do have the ordering perspective of Veronica’s memory.

The back-and-forth structure of both novels, with the frequent repetition of incidents and images, actually gives a clue as to their purpose, which is to make sense of a life full on the one hand of “pain and trouble, disorder and sorrow” and yet constantly hopeful; on the other hand, full of order and blessing and solace. Only by revisiting our lives through memory, says Jolley, is it possible to sense any larger meaning “beyond the immediate.”

But “Memories are not always in sequence. . . . Whether things are written down or not they dwell somewhere within and surface unbidden at any time.” So we are given, especially in “My Father’s Moon,” the sad or absurd details of Veronica’s life, close-up, surreal, uncomprehended; then again, lent a resonance by other things we have learned about her; then again and again . . . so that by the end of the sequel they have begun to shake out into a pattern, like music.

The “weariness and contamination and suffering” of Veronica’s life are apparent from the plot summary. But where Jolley excels is in her grasp of the consolations that may lurk in the interstices of even the bleakest life. Veronica experiences some of the great things: moments of shared music and poetry and laughter and sexuality (it doesn’t even matter that handsome Dr. Metcalf is a two-timing creep). But there are also less obvious, private things: memories of wildflowers and water meadows; grass in all seasons (“damp sweet-smelling grass,” “the wet withered grass of autumn,” “fragile frosted grass”); the “incredible contentedness” she finds in thinning out and transplanting tiny cabbage plants. “I snatch time for being in the garden,” says Veronica in a typically subtle Jolley sentence.

The last image in “Cabin Fever” is of a sandy path through a pine plantation: Veronica remarks simply that she often recommends that her patients take that way to the clinic from the train station. Yet the image of the dry, sandy path is of such apparent personal significance to Elizabeth Jolley that it occurs repeatedly in her novels. I have come to think of it as her image of an earthly paradise, a state that has to do less with faith than with hope and the condition toward which all her novels, with increasing mastery, tend.