Swimming in Trees

Katzenbach aims to offer a visionary book that's part therapeutic novel and part spiritual allegory suffused with feminist and goddess themes. Styled as a murder mystery set in 1981 Rhinebeck, N.Y., the book is an account of the author's descent into madness, or what she calls ""the swimming in trees."" She attempts to demonstrate how, through the exercise of storytelling, she recovered her soul and returned to sanity after the loss of a beloved sibling. A pantherlike woman called Manda appears as the incarnation of murderous rage, the personification of the malignant force in Katzenbach's psyche. Manda's first appearance in black biker leather emphasizes the author's menacing aggression; a flashback to sexual abuse in the character's adolescence points out Katzenbach's vulnerability; a psychotic experience in an asylum underscores her craziness. Katzenbach bestows aspects of the goddess upon all her female characters: Rulla, for example, a homeless woman at the YWCA, is also Baubo, the pig goddess, who makes mothers in labor laugh. The author delves enthusiastically into a rich soup of symbolism, and her prose frequently attains the visionary density and power to which it aspires. But Katzenbach's blurring of the border between fiction and reality is more confusing than edifying. The manner in which she insists that the inner life is as real as the outer life--that what some call madness others experience as wisdom--winds up concealing more than it reveals. (Dec.)