Years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bowen give a lecture on the difficulties of writing a novel. Describing the Retreat from Moscow, she inferred, was nothing compared to getting people to move from one room to another: why were they moving? how much should one go into why and how? I seem to recall her saying that Virginia Woolf, having once spent three months separating her characters from their boeuf en daube, was stuck with them for another six, hanging about in the passage.

Elizabeth Bowen implied that this problem of short-distance transit was an artistic nuisance; but I think she meant one to accept it also as a cultural fact which the artistic difficulty merely reflected; as a cogent paradox for our times, when moving from country to country and from world to world has become easy, but getting to the airport is still the worst part of the trip. Being stuck seems to be as much one of our myths as being lost was for the Ancient Greeks: Ulysses' wandering translates for us into a day of circling Dublin, and hell is the locked room of Sartre's No Exit or the mindless after-dinner paralysis of Buñuel's Exterminating Angel.

Paula Fox's most recent novel, The Widow's Children, is about being stuck. It is spare and understated, and so intensely cool that it becomes sometimes unpleasant to read. Its first 150 pages are an experience of pure claustrophobia. But it is also the most elegant exploration I have read of the chaos of modern life, and of the inertia and deprivations on which that chaos rests.

The plot is almost non-existent: two of the characters are about to leave for a trip to Africa, and three others have come to have a farewell supper with them. There are three Maldonadas (a name which my atrocious Spanish tempts me to read as "recipient of evil"). Laura, who is extravagant and ruthless, her rejected and timid daughter, Clara, and her brother Carlos, a gentle, feline failure, full of affection and social warmth. There is also Desmond Clapper, Laura's second husband, who, like her first, lives mainly to get drunk, and Peter Rice, an old friend, who works in a publishing house.

They talk about Moroccan dancing girls and Ecuadorian profiles; Laura, who is described as "una viajera," has traveled over several continents, but insists there are only six of them. In image and in memory, the characters comprehend the world. But in fact they are in a hotel room and doomed to get little further. Far from reaching Africa, they will be lucky if they can struggle out of the room, through the passage, and to the restaurant where they expect to eat. The restaurant is called Le Canard Privé, which translates equally well into The Caged Duck or The Private Illusion.

That pun informs the novel. Illusion and the state of being caged are synonymous, so closely interwoven that it is impossible to say where cause becomes effect. What Paula Fox describes is the human animal removed from its natural habitat and placed in the artifice of contemporary life. The atmosphere of this environment leaves the hotel room without air, and causes the potted ferns in the lobby to be plastic; when she says she is dizzy from lack of oxygen, Clara is dissuaded from going outside, and told instead to imagine a pond in spring. Nature has been subverted into the fake equivalents of a zoo landscape, and the zoo animals prowl about deprived, perverted and confused by this alien, captive existence. But still, their animal nature clings to them like nostalgia; all the Maldonadas are fond of apes and monkeys, Carlos walks like a cat, Peter makes noises like a seagull, Clara pretends she is a brood of baby possums nestling in a spoon, and recalls how her father, dead drunk, barked like a dog. It is her mother, Laura, however, whose jungle needs remain paramount and obvious, despite their perversion from natural grandeur into a sort of mean anarchy. She derogates human dignity: "'Tell me about the dignity of leopards! Of cockroaches! But don't tell me about the dignity of man!'" She is a bigot. She throws tantrums and glasses. She is not entirely human: "She felt that … she was cut off forever from speech, that if she spoke, there would be no words, only a barbaric gibbering…." But even she has been trained into a gross version of civilization, and in the sequence where we see her most intimately, wild with grief, soaked with rain, she is also desperate to urinate, her jungle wildness pathetically at odds with her inability to satisfy this simple impulse.

As with other animals shut up in zoos, the outstanding danger of captivity is infertility, disruption of mating and breeding habits. The race is dying out. Carlos is homosexual; Laura, who has had four abortions, seems eager to devour the one child she allowed by accident to be born; the daughter herself is involved in a presumably unreproductive exercise in adultery, while the editor, Peter, is turning from fleshly appetites to the mineral endurance his name suggests.

The result of their captivity, then, is simple: there are unlikely to be survivors. But the causes of their bondage are manifold and reach from their own numbed wills to the crime-besieged city where they are having the farewell dinner. The five bon voyage celebrants are occluded from celebration by almost everything: by poverty-marred childhoods, and histories touched with political violence and displacement, by a death in the family, by slow elevators, by buses which may be late, and food which is not what they wanted. As they make their uncertain way from the hotel room down to the street, they are stopped in the corridor by a publisher's party for Randy Cunny, the porno-queen. Their passage past, strewn with false recognitions and specious invitations, is as fraught with dangers as Christian's road through the Slough of Despond. But Paula Fox is infinitely subtle in her definitions; it takes a moment to realize one has met with allegory.

And the book as a whole has an edge of allegory. Like all of us, the characters are most closely confined in their inescapable bondage to each other: "Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition," says Peter to Clara. And of the grandmother who brought her up, Clara says "She was like a locked room I had escaped from." But Clara has not escaped. The single real event in the novel's progress, the grandmother's death, happens before the narrative begins, and only Laura knows about it. Children and grandchildren describe the old woman in their memory of her as a joyful and beautiful innocence, decaying into tired, poor, and painful old age, and meeting the solitary death of Everyman. She is called Alma (the human soul, perhaps, or am I being too simple minded?) and the book's climax is really about nothing more than a decision whether Clara should go to her funeral, and about nothing less than modern man's chance of cutting his losses, turning away from history, the strength of his delusions, and the mad downhill race toward chaos, to remain recognizably human.

By the end of the book one understands that Paula Fox has been writing gently and uninsistently about the rule of chaos and its hold on her characters and our imagination. Peter recalls Laura recurrently as he first saw her on a spring morning, a vision of freedom and possibility, the joys of disorganization. He becomes, in the course of the novel, its protagonist, and he reaches the recognition that his spring epiphany was a sweet delusion. Her friends and relations refer often to Laura's lawlessness, and she becomes the emblem, the raw material of the city's chaos and the anarchy of modern life. She is fond of the word "nothing." "'What you've done is nothing … nothing!'" are her last words to Peter. They comprehend all there is.

But she may be right. Without the illusion of freedom inherent in lawlessness, not much seems to be left. Only a sort of modest obedience to human decency and ritual order, exemplified in the funeral itself and in an image of Hassidim on the way there. The book ends with another memory, fragile, fading, Victorian, replacing Peter's golden vision of Laura: "… another spring morning … when he'd … heard, below in the kitchen, the voices of his mother and his sisters, as they went about making breakfast, known the cat and dog had been let out … and felt that day, he only wanted to be good." It would be hard to say if that vision is closer to the truth than the other, or further away.

Fox leaves us with an ambiguous solution. She restricts herself in writing to rigors which equal those to which she restricts her characters. When we meet a squeezed lemon on page 12, we know we will encounter it again because otherwise it would not be there. She extends the limitations she describes in her fiction to include the fact of her writing it. There is something marvelously honorable in her work. Meticulous in observing the unities, she moves through a corner of New York as if she were moving through Thebes. With great economy, she extends five characters to six, then seven, and brings in an occasional messenger, voices of the city, waiters, taxi drivers; the chorus, in short. And in the last chapter, as we cross the bridge to Queens and it is tomorrow, the release from those tight and airless regions in which she has held us is so enormous it feels almost like a promise of redemption.