CreditCreditThe New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
September 5, 1982, Section 7, Page 9Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Annie Gottlieb is a freelance critic. THE LOVE OF ELSPETH BAKER By Myron S. Kaufmann. 680 pp. New York: Arbor House. $16.95. By ANNIE GOTTLIEB

MYRON S. KAUFMANN is a man who takes his time. His best-selling first novel, ''Remember Me to God,'' was published in 1957; his second novel, ''Thy Daughter's Nakedness,'' appeared in 1968. ''The Love of Elspeth Baker'' is his third. There's a certain unfashionable dignity about that pace, a quiet stubbornness, a disdain for hurry that prevails within Mr. Kaufmann's novels as well as between them.

''The Love of Elspeth Baker'' is a vast, patient book. There's time in it to observe a dragonfly hovering above a summer swimming pool, a piece of paper blowing down a cold Boston street, the shape of an old-fashioned bell pull. There's time for an 18-year-old girl's deft repair of a car transmission and a toilet to be narrated in minute detail; time for a baby to ripen slowly in her womb and finally to be born, contraction by contraction, and then to grow and be patiently diapered and suckled while his spirited unmarried mother tries to figure out what to do with her life. Mr. Kaufmann actually tells us almost every time his heroine, Elspeth, shifts the baby, Petey, from one breast to the other; but far from maddening, the repetition of such little acts of motherhood becomes a lulling leitmotif that wins the reader's patience.

There is time too for many of the book's characters to argue at length about God, whom they regard with a spectrum of feelings distinctively Jewish: despair, exasperation, befuddled awe. ''I told the rabbi God is meshuggeh. I told him straight out. God is meshuggeh,'' says Elspeth's embittered father, Joe Baker, who should know. He has lost one son to Vietnam and the other to a freak medical accident, and now his adored baby daughter, best mechanic and righthand woman in his hardware store has come home from Mount Holyoke with a big belly. ''God isn't Santa Claus,'' counters Elspeth's newly Orthodox cousin, Bob Shoemaker, an M.I.T. marine biologist. ''Who are we to presume that God is morally bound to run the universe in a way that's convenient for us? How self-centered can we get?''

These two qualities of ''The Love of Elspeth Baker'' - profusion of mundane detail and ebullient, long-winded religious speculation - are separate aspects of one vision. Mr. Kaufmann's fascination with the surprises of biology and the inventory of hardware stores has everything to do with his respect for the Creator of this perverse and intricate world. He knows as much about ''being here now'' as Baba Ram Dass or any Zen Buddhist. And, indeed, one of the points this novel unashamedly makes, through Bob Shoemaker and his community of ''froomies'' (from the Yiddish word frum, or pious), is that the Jewish tradition can provide everything its sons and daughters have been seeking in more exotic places: mystical rapture, zest for the natural life of the body, a sense of community, a comprehensive standard of humane conduct (did you know that the Talmud solemnly forbids making fun of people?). In short, as Bob says, it provides ''a vision of the good society.''

But the proselytizing in this book - talky, repetitive and very appealing - doesn't interfere with the pleasures of the plot, which tells how Elspeth picks her way, by healthy instinct and luck, through the million hazards of a world gone awry. Her passage to motherhood is assailed by every kind of false wisdom a life-denying culture can produce. ''It's not even like taking an appendix out. Or a tooth out. It's not even part of you,'' says the Amherst freshman who is the father of Elspeth's child and who has paid for an abortion. ''I suggest you forget about natural childbirth,'' an obstetrician tells her. ''It's nonsense, frankly.'' And Elspeth's father's lawyer advises: ''Breastfeeding isn't the most sanitary thing in the world. ... You can't boil the female breast and sterilize it.''

Without quite knowing why - and with considerable suspense - Elspeth flees two abortionists, gives birth by Lamaze, insists on breast-feeding even though she's giving the baby up for adoption, steals him from the nursery and, the night before signing adoption papers, runs away from the hospital with him. She's right, of course, and she finds allies: a ponytailed male medical resident, an old Jewish landlady, a young Italian lawyer, a woman who runs a gas station, her cousin Bob and his religious community. She also meets a kind, wealthy older man who wants to marry her, baby and all, but who, like most assimilated Jews in the story, is revolted by the froomies and dismayed by Elspeth's increasing attraction to them.

Among the books's many pleasures are its plain language, a fine imaginative sympathy (on the part of a middle-aged male writer) for the young and the female and a poignant portrayal of a great, baffled love between father and daughter. The main flaw, apart from the characters' speechifying, is that Elspeth is a little too good to be true. A gorgeous redhead with breasts ''like pagodas'' who fixes a flooded engine while in labor and pumps gas with one arm while cradling her nursing baby with the other does stretch credibility. Nonetheless, she's a lovely super-heroine.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 7, Page 9 of the National edition with the headline: MODERN JEWISH MOTHER. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe