IN THE PALOMAR ARMS, By Hilma Wolitzer. 307 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $14.95.
THE unmistakable odor of fleshly mortality wafts through the pages of Hilma Wolitzer's fourth novel, as it wafts through the rooms and corridors of the Palomar Arms Senior Home in Ventura, Calif., where the novel's 24-year-old heroine, Daphne Moss, works as a kitchen aide. The home is a friendly enough place, though it bills itself as a ''convalescent and rehabilitation facility'' and everyone knows that it is a rare patient indeed who ever convalesces or gets rehabilitated. ''Their major common complaint is extreme and irrevocable old age, and most of them are kept hostage until they die,'' as Daphne grimly observes.
One scarcely needs to be told that it is a depressing place and that Daphne's tenure there will be brief. She tries to think of the elderly patients as an ''unfortunate club of aliens'' she will never be asked to join. Her strategy is to move in their midst ''breathing out more often than she breathes in'' and dousing herself liberally with perfume to overcome the ''surprisingly interchangeable'' odors of urine and food.
She is generally a sunny young woman, not unlike the 26-year-old heroine of a previous novel, ''Hearts,'' who finds herself a widow with a stepchild after a six-week marriage and must learn to adapt - sometimes with comic results - to her new station in life. In this case Daphne must learn to adjust to life without the consolations and illusions of love, at least for a while.
When we first meet her, she is very much involved with a married man named Kenny; she imagines that when the time is ''right,'' he will simply leave his wife and children and that ''the best years of her infinite and promising life'' will begin. There will be some trouble, of course, but no ''unwarranted violence.'' Daphne is so simple she has failed an elementary test at the telephone company. (She had been trying for a position in Directory Assistance.) And to set the mood for her trysts with Kenny, she has painted her bedroom ceiling midnight blue and pasted luminescent paper stars on it. By the novel's end she is ostensibly wiser - she will paint the ceiling over in rosy pink.
The sadly predictable love affair of Daphne and Kenny is interlarded with chapters from the point of view of two of the Palomar Home's more interesting residents: a 97-year-old woman named Nora McBride who has fibbed about her age and will be grandly feted on her ''100th'' birthday (everyone at the home is determined that Nora will live for her birthday, since media attention is assured and even a telegram from the President) and an elderly sufferer from Parkinson's disease named Joseph Axel, who wants to die. In one of the novel's most poignant scenes, Axel's distraught daughter pleads with Daphne to befriend her father, who is a special person, self-taught, interested in the arts, history and music. ''Daphne was eager to get away before she heard too much, before the woman revealed episodes of her childhood, like home movies, and visions of the manly father who had once pointed out the Big Dipper in a summer sky, and who had seemed tall and powerful as a building against the sky.''
At the novel's end Daphne is brought to a convincing, if not terribly profound, realization: ''Suddenly, in her awful wakefulness, (she) knew what the older people meant. It was that the old-fashioned idea of abiding love - what her generation called commitment - was endangered by the ease of casual sex. The faithful mind and the wanton body were only mortal enemies confined to the same prison.'' Though this would seem to be a modest insight, it does represent a step forward for Daphne, who is last seen ''liberated'' from her adolescent love for Kenny and transferring her credits from mediocre Ventura College to the intellectual heights of San Francisco State University..
''IN THE PALOMAR ARMS'' is a gentle, unpretentious novel populated by well-meaning people who cause one another harm out of ignorance rather than cruelty. The novel's primary weakness, in fact, is a certain blandness of characterization: Daphne and Kenny and Axel and Nora all sound exactly alike, musing to themselves in precisely the same idioms and speech rhythms. Kenny, who should be a strong, pivotal character, is disappointingly wispy, and it is difficult for the reader to take his and Daphne's ''love'' seriously. He is too easily manipulated by his wife's emotional blackmail and pressured into contin of those large stores that carries everything, open and bustling with business. ... When Kenny sees her, he'll be shocked by how different she looks. ... See, I'm already someone else. Why are you telling me this story?''
articlesource:the newyork times
