Asleep in the Deep

TURPIN by Stephen Jones. 307 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

"I wanted to leave, but felt like a man on a crowded escalator waiting for the right step to get off, afraid to reveal his panic to the other shoppers by bolting too soon and the whole time crushed by visions of what would happen when he shreds under, riser and tread, all his ribbon and wrapping adangle down the dark side of the moon." This is Turpin—college graduate, widower, veterinarian, and part-time lobster fisherman—forging flinchingly ahead in three days of misadventure that resembles a manic sleepwalker's nightmare.

Arriving at Turpin's home in a storm, Mandeville, an obvious drunkard and possible psychotic, demands that Turpin circumcise Mandeville's golden retriever. The subsequent brutal murder of the dog is but the beginning of a series of bizarre deaths in which Turpin naturally becomes entrapped. Verbally shanghaied aboard an expensive yacht, Turpin finds himself in Raceport, Long Island, where he grapples with a girl who promptly chokes to death on a wad of chewing gum. Nelson Falorp, wealthy owner of the yacht, has a heart attack in the bathroom of a wharf restaurant, and Turpin becomes responsible for his unwanted corpse. Elsie Falorp jumps out the window of a hotel on Gull Island where Mandeville, Turpin and her husband's body have all been accidentally flown and deserted by the drunken pilot.

Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum. Perhaps because Jones has caught lobsters, sold boats, worked on newspapers and taught school, his showy invasion of the private terrors that lurk just below the surface of apparently calm minds seems somehow fresh—and far removed from the structural, Stygian, self-conscious atrocities of the black comedians with whom he will inevitably be compared.

About lobsters, Turpin observes: "As Nerval says, They know the secrets of the sea and do not bark.' "Stephen Jones knows the secrets of the land and roars with laughter.