FICTION

NOAH AND ME by Antonia Holding Schwed (M. Evans & Co. : $18.95; 168 pp.) . Nathaniel Danzon, the spiritual descendant of Dr. Dolittle, is a New England animal psychotherapist. You read it right: Instead of talking to humans about the birds and the bees, he talks to bees, ants, a fox, a cat and others about their neuroses, which often stem from their relationship with humankind. As Danzon sees it, a lot of animals suffer from what is essentially a fable foible: They’ve heard one too many folk tales about how animals are supposed to behave, and they can’t cope with the discrepancy between what they do and what they think they’re supposed to do. Danzon suffers from his own case of emotional paralysis, since it takes most of the 168 pages for him to make up his mind between Nancy, who works in his office, and Lorna, who works in his home (ah, the mind/body quandary). He is a victim of intention interruptus--every time he thinks he knows what a guy ought to do he starts second-guessing himself, or misinterprets a cue, and ends up doing nothing at all. If he’d been more decisive, this would have been a short story instead of a short novel. As it stands, the sessions with his clients are imaginative, and often amusing. The sessions with human beings are comparatively flat. Schwed seems more perceptive about other species than she is about her own: Danzon doesn’t move forward in time toward an emotional epiphany as much as he stumbles over it at the last minute.