A NEW KIND OF COUNTRY

As her youngest son left home, the creator of Mrs. Pollifax, anticipating "an unemployed heart," bought a small house on the Nova Scotia coast, venturing upon a girlhood dream of independence and self-reliance. Living alone for the first time, she found, was "an unlearning process," a loosening up, and this honest, uncluttered account of that experience is somewhat less sharply invigorating but essentially comparable to, say, May Sarton's The House By the Sea (1977). "East Tumbril" is a small lobstering village where neighbors stop in for a visit unannounced or notice if house lights go out half an hour early. Gilman had some anxious moments, but she came to value the unadorned life of the solitary ("There can be a sense of aloneness that is downright voluptuous"), take sustenance from her garden plot and newfound perceptions ("America is surrounded by countries that mend old kettles"), and feel comfortable with her unassigned place somewhere between older and younger village levels. Although attracted to the invisibles (Ouspensky and Krishnamurti, pyramid power, night silences), she centered on tangibles: garden comfrey as food and poultice, fresh lobster at $1.25 a pound, the local flotilla on Dumping Day ("If it's a gray and sunless morning their white mast lights will glow like pearls on dull pewter"). Quietly, cumulatively engaging.