โConsider the thin, crackly, wrapping paper skin of the onion, as I did this morning while cleaning out the refrigerator. Itโs like any explanation I can offer himโtotally superfluous. Heโll only hear that word, way down the end of any sentence. Orgy.โ So begins this wryly funny, ironic dissection of a housewife on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Depressed by her children, obsessed with cleaning her house and influenced by a libertine neighbor, she experiments halfheartedly with infidelity, hosting one of the more disillusioning orgies in fiction. Author Hayfield, a part-time English instructor at Trenton (NJ) State College and first novelist at 33, writes with a brittle clarity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath. For example, the narrator and her husband drive in a car โwhile the silence darted back and forth between us like a devilโs darning needle, mending the rip in our fragile black fabric of lies.โ This fine book is about the cleaning, scouring and repairing that goes on in all our lives. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10.95)