Books: Pi in the Sky

__ JOURNAL FROM ELLIPSIA by Hortense Calisher. 375 pages. Little, Brown $5.95.

“On, on, on and on, on; and on and on, on. This place is simply teeming with time. Meanwhile, I elided in and out, iris-ing in from slightly more than thirteen billion light-years away, receding at more than the speed of light, and hence invisible, on sources purporting to emanate from a nubbin of matter acting flatly against its own spherical. Miles out to star, you can smell it, the tang of variability here. O how shall I render a what-where-who-how which is always all happening at the same different ONCE! O pi in the sky! 0000000 000000000000000000000000000 those first tingles of the singular in this bigotedly back-and-forth place—got it!”

Got it? Then throw it in the wastebasket. Hortense Calisher, a novelist (False Entry, Textures of Life) and short-storyteller of formidable skill, has unaccountably produced in Journal from Ellipsia a prodigious intellectual plonk: the autobiography of a—well, maybe it is a Hegelian monad, maybe it is an unborn soul, maybe it is a visitor from outer space, maybe it is just something the lady ate. Whatever it is, she writes about it in a style that combines the least admirable characteristics of James Joyce and Henry James with a Hortenseness all her own, and she writes about it for 375 pages. Never explains why.