"The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief and the Afterlife," by Mary Allen. Knopf. 320 pages. $24.

The Rooms of Heaven" is about love, death, the afterlife and several forms of madness, elements of which teeter on the edge of Oprah-land but never quite fall in, since Allen manages to steer around the puffy stereotypes that are common to such landscapes.

Allen's "creative non-fiction" is fluid and fat-free. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she doesn't soft-pedal her own stupidity -- "what grabbed my imagination was drugs and sex and death, the sad, awful romance of self-destruction" -- nor does she bonk the reader over the head with Every Lesson Learned.

In fact, her tragedy is more powerful for her need not to see it coming, to wield her love against its ominous signs: "they came floating in like scraps of driftwood, bits of seaweed, along with all the rest." As the shocks escalate, so does her denial; the remarkable thing is how she manages to weave her later insight into the narrative, placing markers in the mist without ruining the spell.

To recount specific plot points here would jeopardize the gathering pace of the story, the little jolts of surprise, and the subtle interplay between the author's foreshadowing and the reader's foreboding. Yes, a sudden death does occur long before the end of the book, but the turmoil that ensues does not include spectral sightings, fortuitous reincarnations, or Orphean journeys to retrieve the beloved from the netherworld.

Allen does muddle disastrously in the occult, but rather than play these scenes like an "X-File," she uses them to contemplate the fine line between psychic and psychotic: "I don't know how the idea came to me, but once it arrived I grabbed it and ran. That was easy to do in the world I was in then, where thoughts grew out of silent conversations with the invisible dead, where there were no boundaries, no limits, where there was nothing to tell you, this is happening but this isn't, this is all some goofy thing you're coming up with yourself," and later, "What I think is that maybe we have it wrong: It's what's in our heads that's real; it's the outside -- the hard-edged, measurable, material world -- that's an illusion."

"Rooms of Heaven" is less about heaven than the hell we can experience on earth, particularly when we lead with our hearts. It is also about the gradual embrace of psychosis, with one of the best descriptions of its seductive and comforting "logic" since Plath's "The Bell Jar." But it is also full of humor and sharp observations: "Addiction is the tar baby, another person might step up to it and take a swing but they'll just get stuck too."

And most of all, there is hope -- Allen is attracted to danger, but she's no Oatesian victim in love with her swoon. She is an active player in her own destiny, working to understand and shape it, struggling to reconcile fact and fantasy and finally coming away with a heightened sense of wonder, for, even after all the terror, grief, and madness, she can still say: "I used to think the universe was absolutely devoid of magic."

Judith Schlesinger, a professor at Pace University, is a psychotherapist who holds a doctorate in psychology. Her biography on Humphrey Bogart was published this fall, and she is working on a new book about creativity, madness and musicians.

Pub Date: 03/14/99