The Archivist, by Martha Cooley

Little, Brown and Company, 328 pages, $22.95

Poor T.S. Eliot. The most complex and reserved of American poets, the champion of impersonality in literature, has become a favorite target for down-market Freudians and reductionists of all stripes. They pick apart his failed marriage, his sexual experiences, his religion, his attitude toward Jews, all with the democratic glee of dwarves attacking a giant.

In her first novel, Martha Cooley joins this "Tom and Viv" school of Eliot interpretation, turning his life into a metaphor for the dangers of emotional reserve. There is much quoting of Eliot in this book, but little understanding.

Cooley's narrator is Matthias, an archivist at a prominent university library that houses the letters Eliot wrote to his friend Emily Hale after the failure of his first marriage. As we learn through flashbacks and journal entries, Matthias was once, like Eliot, married to a troubled woman, Judith. Also like Eliot, he had his wife committed to an institution. Now the entry into his life of Roberta, a graduate student with an intense interest in Eliot, reawakens his old memories and forces him to confront his emotional deadness.

As the story unfolds, we see that Judith's tangled Jewish heritage and her dread of the Holocaust drove her into the kind of supersensitive glamour that passes for insanity in much contemporary fiction; Matthias, unable to live with this intensity, retreated into his logical life, for which his job as an archivist is a none-too-subtle metaphor. By allowing Roberta to penetrate his shell, and by eventually taking an unexpected action with regard to the Eliot letters, he makes some restitution for his treatment of Judith.

In sum, Cooley takes the revenge on Matthias that seemingly she would like to take on Eliot: she makes him pay for his coldness with regret and suffering. And this moral mission overpowers any novelistic pleasures that The Archivist might have to offer. Most of the events are told but not shown, resulting in long stretches of dialogue, along with internal monologue that reads like plot summary. There is also a subtheme having to do with Judaism versus Christianity, in which Judith and Matthias become assimilated to passion and apathy, respectively; but here, too, there is no lived resonance, just a war of archetypes in which the author has decided the victor well in advance. It is as though The Archivist allows itself to dispense with emotional verity because it wants to be a novel of ideas. But in that case, it should have better ideas.

-- Adam Kirsch