SPIRITUAL PREDICAMENTS
 
 

         A Chekhovian garden with people gently and unrequitedly in love with each other is suggested by some of the quiet futility in The Prism (Doubleday, $3.95), a first novel by Jennifer Lash, a young English girl.  Most of the story takes place in an English abbey, whose atmosphere is impressively captured -- stone, candlelight, bells; and in the nearby home of Isabella, a lonely young wife whose husband is stationed with his regiment in Germany.  The first sentence is the book shows her sitting in front of a mirror, but whether she really sees herself, then or ever, is questionable.

          She bluntly tells one of the monks, the proudly intellectual Dom Lucius, that she loves him.  This old friend of her husband promptly retreats, but later, his ambiguous, middle-of-the-night call on Isabella arouses suspicion in his fiercely monastic community.  The abbot transfers him to the tenement section of a city, and there Dom Lucius feels that at last he is coming close to people.  But when a failed young novice, partially escaping from his mother's sweet but firm domination, comes to him for love, Dom Lucius takes refuge in another withdrawal.  The result is a disaster -- the one authentically physical action in the book.

          Although Miss Lash sometimes oversimplifies, she is quite capable of dramatizing the spiritual predicaments of her characters.  She phrases many of her sentences shrewdly, and when her prose needs colors she can stipple it with exactly the right ones.  Nevertheless she has an occasional tendency to tell the reader too much or to lean into novelese, as may be noted in this passage:  "At last, Lucius, monk of austerity and words, had found a way in which to translate the latent passions of an ordinary man into the ecstasies of a visionary."  Miss Lash usually does better than that; she is something more than just a promising novelist, for she has an acute sensitivity to people and to religious problems.
 

                              ------------------Harry T. Moore