Little Nell, Unhappy Again : TIME AND TIDE, <i> By Edna O’Brien (Farrar Straus Giroux: $21; 326 pp.)</i>

Even an enthralled reader occasionally wants to call timeout in this novel, when the rush of gloomy events and bleak sufferings becomes too much. With tears streaming down his face, the loyal reader, borne along on Edna O’Brien’s prose as on the ever-swelling breast of a great, relentless wave, calls halt from time to time, whether from simple exhaustion or a wavering of belief, it may be hard to tell.

Certainly there are women and men like Nell Steadman, the heroine of “Time and Tide,” who suffer piteously in childhood, adulthood and parenthood. Certainly there are real people like Nell, star-crossed in their sex, unlucky in their habits, accursed among men. We feel pity for such people. Just as we feel a harrowing pity for Nell.

But our next thought usually is: What went wrong? What caused this outrageous disaster? If the fault is in the character of our heroine, then we want that explained. If the fault is external to her, product of weird happenstance and plain rotten luck, then at least a philosophical position suggests itself, and we are partly satisfied.

O’Brien’s Nell, an Irish girl thrown unfairly into life (but we are all thrown into it unfairly, too soon, dangerously), struggles at first in an awful marriage. Her husband, first of the novel’s considerable list of male monsters, demeans her, insults her, turns icy cold, etc. We are puzzled as to the cause of their troubles, and then we learn in passing that Nell had taken a lover. Nell makes no comment about this, and even O’Brien seems not to have considered that there might be a connection, that being cuckolded may have put the man in a bad mood.

In any case, the marriage dissolves, and an ugly custody battle ensues. Nell’s attachment to her two sons, Paddy and Tristan, is movingly portrayed. Yet her struggle to retain custody is oddly slapdash, and her passivity in so important a situation puzzles. Even so, she does win in the end.

Her response to her victory is fatalistic, depressive, even a little irritating: “As she sat and heard herself being awarded custody . . . she felt not the glorious surge of victory that she had anticipated but instead a great onset of sorrow. . . . The true consequences of it all would unfold and the heartbreak she had been party to would live like a ghost in whatever room, whatever country she happened to be in.”

Nell lives in London with her boys. She works--competently, we gather--as an editor at a publishing house. Her relations with men are uniformly disastrous. She begins to remind us of a Jean Rhys heroine, except that Rhys usually allows her women a nastiness, a guttersnipe’s ability to twist the knife, whereas Nell can only be stepped on and abused. The boys grow up, go off to boarding school, into the world. Nell allows her disordered, painful romantic life to affect her relationship with her sons, and they begin to lose respect for her.

O’Brien’s melodious, fluent prose is one of the sweetest pleasures of contemporary fiction, and “Time and Tide” displays her gift eloquently. There is the quirky, Miss Dallowayish sensitivity, a fine-tuned vibrating to all the currents in the air; there is also O’Brien’s propensity for colorful, Whitmanesque lists (“up the crowded lane past stalls crammed with novelties: silver, gold, pewter, samovars, tea sets begging to be used, tapestries, rugs, and humbler things such as saucepans. . . . At the end of the lane, as they waited for the bus, Tristan bought a slab of very white cheese, which he ate as if it were an ice-cream wafer. Sitting on the rim of the laden barrel, she felt an enormous surge of happiness.”) We readers are always a little on edge, always a little excited, as we sense that O’Brien may take off at any moment on some startling digression: some inexplicable, apposite ramble, which will end up who knows where. This excitement, at its best, is like the excitement of life.

But in the end, Nell fails to win us over, largely because her suffering seems gratuitous, and her response to it is weaker than we want. There is a lack of humor, a lack of balance. Her passivity colors every incident of the book, without ever becoming its subject.

If she suffers because she’s Irish, a woman, and alive, this implies a fatalism that needs to be discussed. But the truth is that she invites her own destruction, even welcomes it--and this very strange psychology seems to have escaped the author’s notice.