A State of Independence : THROUGH THE IVORY GATE, <i> by Rita Dove</i> (<i> Pantheon Books: $21; 277 pp.; ISBN 0-679-41604-8</i>

Accustomed as all of us in this country are--and as no doubt it is instructive for us to be--to the rhetoric of rage, some may find this first novel by the second African-American to win a Pulitzer prize for poetry almost shocking in its sweet optimism, its willingness to forgive. Here is narrative prose whose first impulse is to describe its world precisely, without preconception. Such writing is felt by the reader as a kind of caress. It is as if the book reaches out to the reader, saying “Join me in this venture; we’re side by side here.”

This is not to suggest that author Rita Dove fails to address important issues of race, for race is central to her heroine’s predicament. Virginia King, a puppeteer in residence in Akron, Ohio, as an Artist-in-the-Schools, had been drawn first to music and studied the cello; in college in Wisconsin, she became a drama major (courageously insisting on her right to study mime), but when she had difficulty finding roles for black women, she joined an experimental puppet troupe. After a prologue, it is in Akron with her puppets that we find her.

In the prologue, we have met Virginia in childhood--in the same city of Akron, before her family moved to Arizona--and watched as she hurled out the window the “Negro baby doll” her grandmother had given her. Through subsequent years in Arizona, and college and a commune in the midwest, Virginia’s progress is away from self-hatred toward a state of independence, a place in the world and her mind where she can delight in being herself.

And what an interesting young woman she is, this student of Bach and Brecht who also cares about her family and friends and the children she brings the magic of theater to; who, even though she remembers when a childhood friend called her “Nigger,” grows close to her white roommate in college but reserves Saturday afternoons for visiting with her black girlfriends, “scattered like raisins among the white swirls of coeds during the week,” and who falls in love, the first time, like just about every woman of just about any race, with a man who cannot help but break her heart.

At every point, Dove helps us to see Virginia’s life as clearly as if we were living it. We see “the nine o’clock sun pressed flat into the pasty sky.” A neighbor has upper arms “spongy as Wonder bread.” We hear music like “a leaf shaken of the last rain.” At moments her writing about music becomes music-like itself, “the true music that gripped and made pride bow down before the monumental sadness of being alive, music that required no explication, no translation.”

Virginia’s progress is from a history of hurt to a new hopefulness. In returning to her hometown, she undertakes a journey of discovery. A family secret is revealed--the hidden truth that had divided her parents, Ernest and Belle, and plunged them into isolating despair.

“It was some strange grief, maybe the same grief that paralyzed her father at the kitchen table, his brow bent over his clenched hands long after grace was said, the same grief that turned Belle’s gaze inward and made her talk to the unborn child when she thought no one was listening. Maybe it was even the sadness Virginia and Ernie Jr. felt at leaving Akron for a place that looked like the moon.”

But her grandmother explains, “You see, if you’re one of the damaged, you have to confront the damage to find out what you can use before you put the rest away. There’s always something you can use.” In art and life, it is clear, Virginia will find a use for what she learns.

Throughout the novel Dove interweaves past and present, Virginia’s return to Akron layered like a cake with returns via recollection to childhood and college. No irony distracts us from our engagement with these events, narrated or remembered. In fact, it is a pleasure to read a contemporary novel that does not depend on irony to establish a sense of collusion or complicity between author and reader. And it may be this lack of irony that accounts for the certain sweet purity (not puritanism) that suffuses the story, runs through like a melodic line--and it is a relief, too, from postmodernism’s insistence on being in the know, one up, too cool for words.

Rita Dove’s Pulitzer prize-winning collection, “Thomas and Beulah,” a searching and affectionate portrait in poetry, evinced her inclination toward narrative and characterization. “Through the Ivory Gate” was preceded by a small book of fiction titled “Fifth Sunday.” With this intelligent novel of a young black woman’s coming-of-age, Dove pursues her talents in prose.