TROUBLE IN THE FLESH

Suppose you were a sensitive, loyal woman with a great capacity for love, married to a brilliant but neurotic and totally egocentric playwright to whom you could never be more than part-time mistress and full-time mother. What could you do? Jill is trapped in this situation with her husband Soton Farrier, his charming but eccentric family, and her infant son. It began with intriguing off-beat romance, but now it's a nightmare punctuated by drinking, affairs, and more desperate flights from responsibility as unexpected success only points up Seton's basic insecurities, which stem from a dope-addicted mother. The scene is laid in Cape Cod, Greenwich Village, midtown Manhattan, and Lake Placid; and the long, detailed, tortuously involved story ends with the grieved but hopeful Jill getting a divorce on a psychoanalyst's recommendation. Though the publisher won't mention it, this novel is a massive clinical study of Eugene O'Neill, and for once we have a distinctly unfavorable report, with his ""genuis"" being weighed and found wanting. Sporadically fascinating, sometimes unpleasantly realistic, sometimes tedious, but on the whole an unusual and interesting novel. The O'Neill parallel has been made, and the book may well be a popular possibility.