Chamber Music
Grumbach, Doris
CHAMBER MUSIC Doris Grumbach / Dutton / $8.95 Mike Brown American prose fiction is in a bit of a slump. Most novels today are mere waystations to movies or the cathode-ray tube. In those that are...
...As a literary critic, Doris Grumbach produces some extremely fine lyrical writing, mostly descriptive and introspective...
...The novels are discouraging: pretentious rather than profound...
...But their efforts, though admirable, have hardly been stellar...
...Wolff has been to the well three times, Sheed eight...
...Yet it was there, in that curious moment...
...Considering the drudgery of criticism these days-mining through the great lodes of drivel published each month, picking up an occasional nugget, jotting down a technical note on how this or that might have been improved, remarking on the obscene profiteering of the more vulgar novelists-it's no wonder that the more sensible critics have enlisted in fiction's ranks...
...Chamber Music is her third novel...
...Though blind to her husband's homosexuality, she is battered by his indifference and finally numbed by the grotesque, syphilitic death she must attend...
...What is more, they write about this fiction, such as it is, in an orderly, lucid manner that must humiliate many best-selling novelists, who have trouble moving a character through a doorway...
...Leonard has written four novels, and is working on a fifth...
...But the lesbian denouement in Chamber Music, whatever purposes Grumbach's homosexual figures served in her first two novels, seems to make little sense, even to the protagonist: "This need, for a woman, I could in no way comprehend...
...Without doubt, Grumbach has created so beleaguered a character in Caroline as to make the contemporary crop of oppressed women in liberationist fiction look like the self-pitying martyrs they are...
...Grumbach's pathetic homosexuals (for instance Paul, who "looked fragile, almost ephemeral, like a Cimabue angel lit from an invisible source") receive sympathetic treatment in both...
...In those that are not, once-promising writers maunder about "relationships" or groan with the constipation of literary senecti-tude...
...If Grumbach's earlier novels displayed her interest in the darker sides of the soul, in the desperation of lonely women and the tragedy of domestic life, Chamber Music is the chamber of horrors where these things germinate...
...If she is a bit more difficult to pin down these days, appearing across the continent in various newspapers and journals, including the New York Times Book Review and Saturday Review, her critical writing is still among the best...
...She recounts their rather brief life together, her tragic loneliness, his death, and the love affair she begins shortly after she is widowed...
...The same, alas, is true of Doris Grum-bach...
...Our best literary critics, people like John Leonard, Wilfred Sheed, Geoffrey Wolff, and Doris Grumbach, know this of course...
...They are school novels, the first (written when Grumbach taught at the College of St...
...The first two, Spoil of the Flowers and The Short Throat, The Tender Mouth, were published one after the other in the early 1960s...
...His wife Caroline is his unfortunate adjunct, delicate, passive, haunted by her inadequacies, trapped in her unhappy marriage...
...It's no surprise that the most acclaimed book of fiction this year is a collection of stories from the past 30 years, and those are from the doughty pen of John Cheever (our "master stylist...
...read for other than historical reasons 50 years hence...
...Despite the excellence of their critical prose, they seem unable to produce as well in fiction...
...Both probe, somewhat melodramatically, such grim subjects as homosexuality and suicide...
...Rose) is set in a girl's college, the second at Washington Square College in New York City in 1939 (from which Grumbach graduated that same year...
...They are also much the same novel...
...Robert Maclaren, the composer, is a loveless man whose only passion is to write, perform, and listen to music...
...But as a novelist she still struggles to make a half-told story a well-wrought piece of fiction...
...Ghamber Music is no improvement...
...It can safely be said that no American novel published in the last several years will be Mike Brown is an editorial assistant at the San Francisco Chronicle...
...She takes refuge in a homosexual love affair of her own, with the young, buxom nurse who has helped with the dying Robert...
...She tells her story with little emotion and by book's end we must conclude that she is capable of little...
...With this outcome Grumbach seems to forsake what moral order did exist in Caroline's benighted marriage...
...Grumbach won her reputation as a critic earlier in this decade when she served as literary editor of the New Republic...
...It is a slight novel, barely 200 pages, made all the slighter by a paucity of action and dialogue...
...The book is the soulful memoir of a 90-year-old woman, the widow of a famous American composer (based on the actual American composer Edward MacDowell...
...Though Catholicism, the solitude of women, and the seven deadly sins are corollary themes in these books, Grumbach creates no characters strong enough to carry such freight...
...And in the end, neither book manages to rise above the standard (and dubious) assertion of perversity as the neurosis of a higher aesthetic sensibility...
...Certainly a lesbian affair with an Earth Mother surrogate (the nurse Anna is a passionate naturalist) doesn't necessarily follow from Caroline's travails, no matter how soul-wrenching...
...The current sprightliness of that magazine owes much to her stewardship...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
