Looking for Work
Cheever, Susan
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "LOOKING FOR WORK" Susan Cheever / Simon & Schuster / $8.95 joshua Gilder Somebody expects Susan Cheever's tale of fashionable Angst in the New York woman to be hot stuff. Redbook has...
...Especially now that we all think that money is power...
...If it's tough for Sally being a writer, with those other writers grabbing up all the images and turning them into clichrs before she gets a chance, she needn't worry: She does very well inventing her own...
...Realistically-minded" congressmen and senators were singled out for meritorious conduct: Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern, Wayne Morse, William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, Frank Church, even Jacob Javits...
...For while in traditional terms her protagonist does little jobhunting, it is clear that in her novel personal and fictional experience, private and public life, have become identical...
...Others, with even the simplest description, induce nausea...
...One feels suddenly prudish and would "rather not know...
...I t is probably important to mention the autobiographical element of Looking for Work in order to understand to what extent the author may be accountable for the idiocies of her heroine...
...Is marriage just another exercise in acquisition, with markdowns on older models and racks of possible purchases displayed to their best advantage...
...Redbook has excerpted it, the Literary Guild has chosen it an alternate selection, and Warner Brothers has bought up the movie rights...
...Hemingway, for one, comes to mind...
...Max Angelo is a real man, not like her weakling husband, who, depressed by Sally's obvious infidelities, gets drunk at parties and doesn't even know, the poor slob, that Max is making a fool of him...
...As to Republicans and Democrats generally, they follow where the monopolists lead them...
...It is said about former President Johnson that he would hold interviews while seated on the toilet, symbolically asserting his dominance in a most effective way...
...In such a way do love affairs become job interviews...
...Ralph Nader was also given special commendation...
...obscures the exploitative character of the state.'" Such, anyway, was the message...
...She does make a few half-hearted attempts at job interviews, but prefers to spend her days brushing her dog and wishing her husband's trust fund were bigger...
...Head over heels over head" must be her favorite, guessing from the number of times she repeats it...
...Such "Solons" might actually stand up to the President, even if he was of the same party...
...Beginning in the early 1960s, a few Soviet spokesmen began to point to " r e a l i s t i c t e n d e n c i e s " appearing within, of all places, the "ruling bourgeoisie" of America...
...They remained fundamentally the same: tools of big business and the Pentagon...
...Hilarity...
...In American government, they claimed, there can be no genuine separation of powers, no checks and balances...
...self-respecting woman, especially one with Elsa Peretti diamond earrings and a Koos Van den Akker dress, not to mention a budding feminist consciousness (it goes very fashionably with the whole outfit, don't you think...
...But she has a problem, as she explains in this paragraph: I can't write about blew York because a thousand other writers have pummeled the city's images into cliches...
...To quote The Law of the Soviet State, Andrei Vishinsky's magnum opus, which is still cited by Soviet jurists as the authoritative work on law: "The Constitution of the U.S.A...
...Thus, Soviets writing on American politics came to speak more often about the effectiveness of certain members of Congress in criticizing the foreign policy of the executive...
...Doesn't it make your toes tingle...
...You've got me...
...Angelo," the bartender says...
...Guccis, summer in Ez6 with Lord and Lady Moulting, a psychoanalyst copping a feel, Ladoucette chilling in a silver bucket, Ladoucette at the Carlyle with famous author, sex with famous author, sex with famous sculptor, sex at the Harvard Club, Elsa Peretti diamond earrings, Cartiers, lunch a t . . . Thus unfolds the story of Sally Gardens, her marriage to the nebbish Jason (who has, nevertheless, a very attractive trust fund), and her various affairs, most especially her lusting after "burly," monosyllabic, "Iwant-to-luck-you-Sally" Max...
...And then Jason is often so unsure of himself, while Max is always in such perfect command...
...Lest one feel any sympathy for the man, here is a passage showing just what Sally had to put up with: After dinner we piled into the Konovers' car and headed uptown on Madison Avenue...
...I am very suggestible...
...What a boring person...
...Realists, they said, could be found, even if rarely, in Congress...
...Then it' s off to Sally' s apartment and it's "Head over heels over head and then we are in bed a n d . . . " Discretion compels me to draw the curtain at this moment on Sally and Max, but for more than the usual reason...
...Even so, they still stopped short of asserting that any profound contradictions between the executive and legislative organs of government could arise...
...Is this all there is to New York, or do the city's boundaries extend beyond the author's experience...
...Yes, Mr...
...Longlegged career girls bobbing to the bus these cool, early autumn mornings, and soon, snow falling softly on the skaters at Rockefeller Center...
...A glance at the dustjacket reveals some obvious points in common between Ms...
...She swallows whole all the fashionable platitudes and cynicisms fed to her, but there is no mediating consciousness to make sense of them...
...While the realists perceived that nonbelligerence and cooperation could keep the world free of thermonuclear war and local conflicts, while encouraging the forces of "social progress," the hotheads spoke "unrealistically" and anachronistically of maintaining American "positions of strength" throughout the world...
...into the arms of a world famous sculptor...
...Susan Cheever's bedtime interludes, more than unerotic, are decidedly unpleasant...
...In this sense "looking for work" is an appropriate title for her novel...
...Looking for V/'ork is a good example of this...
...LOOKING FOR WORK Susan Cheever / Simon & Schuster / $8.95 joshua Gilder Somebody expects Susan Cheever's tale of fashionable Angst in the New York woman to be hot stuff...
...I steer myself toward [Max] and he sees me and suddenly the knots of people break apart and he comes toward me and everything is all right...
...For those with neither the time nor the patience to read the whole novel, herewith the salient points of Looking for Work: Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer, Elaine's, opening at the Whitney, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg drinking Jack Daniels (you were perhaps wondering his brand...
...Especially if you have no children, or if they are grown...
...Some writing is a lot like that, as when it unloads on the reader the minutiae of the author's life through a fictional stand-in...
...They might even sometimes speak out against the beslseniye, the "hotheads...
...Thus everything in the novel seems to be either a fashion plate or a cliche, the prefabricated articles of experience...
...And I," proclaimed Seymour, "I am looking for a man with no redeeming sense of social value...
...Perhaps the most striking thing about Sally Gardens is her confusion, the whorl of undigested ideas knocking about inside her head...
...Clearly, the girl is bordering on a severe case of anomie...
...In the middle of laughing I looked over at Jason sitting next to me in the back seat...
...If you are supporting another person financially, how can you justify it...
...John Kenneth Galbraith and C. Wright Mills, some of whose writings have long since been translated into Russian, were, and are, often cited as authorities for this view...
...Such "prominent figures" understood the real balance of forces in the world...
...But a new book, called simply Constitutional Interrelationships Be32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980...
...It's enough to drive any Joshua Gilder is a writer living in New York...
...Why do some people pay for other people if not in return for services rendered...
...Thank God you've gotten here," he says...
...Or ever love again at all, really...
...Cheever, through her protagonist, wraps up her whole novel into one skillfully packaged cliche: But there is no going back and unraveling those old mistakes, although there are plenty of times now when I don't think I'll ever get married, or have children, or love anyone again in the wonderful simple he'll-take-care-of-me way that 1 loved J'ason once...
...The difference is hard to pin down, but the effect is unmistakable...
...No one dared suggest that the House and Senate might effectively challenge t h e ' 'dictatorial" powers--written or unwritten--of the President...
...She has no center, and like all such people she is grasping, selfish, and acquisitive, trying to fill up an empty self with things...
...Imagine falling asleep during such lively conversation...
...It reads very much like a diary, and an unexpurgated one at that...
...She mostly looks for C O 6 E ~5 t - n THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980 31 men to have affairs with, and sometimes, as with her cocaine-sniffing Village Voice editor, this eventually leads to work...
...She even uses Vonnegut's instant cliche, "So it goes," and, at the risk of giving away the ending to Max and Sally's torrid love affair, we can see in this passage how Ms...
...Mendicants are no longer saintly men...
...Is courtship just another hype...
...So, too, is its opposite...
...The same is true with sex...
...Their affair begins at a New York opening where, Sally's friend assures her, the other women will "all be practically naked...
...They perceived that America could no longer assert its power, and their favorite example was Vietnam, where the U.S...
...had attempted in vain to "roll back the inevitable course of history...
...It can't be that you are paying for their body in bed . . . . How can it work anyway, this money business between men and women...
...Nowhere is this clearer than in this interior monologue, well worth quoting at length: In the Village Voice today I read a story about how marriage is really just a form of prostitution...
...Presidents function as mouthpieces o f " monopoly capitalism...
...To fill time, Sally also tries to write...
...Still, in the early days of the Brezhnev regime, no one went so far--in print, anyway--as to suggest that American governmental institutions per se had somehow changed...
...Seymour, I think you've found him at last," said John in mock earnest voice...
...I told you it would be boring...
...It's hard to be tactful about having someone depend on you for money, I suppose...
...Albert L. Weeks is a professor teaching politics and history at New York University and the author of several articles and many books on world affairs...
...In the 1970s, especially with drtente, official writings began to suggest that something other than perfect harmony prevailed in the "governmental apparat" of the United States--that basic tensions might, and did, arise between the two great branches of government in Washington, the legislative and executive...
...Free, I am f r e e . " S a l l y doesn't actually do much looking for work...
...The separation of powers, writers still insisted, was "illusory...
...The Constitution itself, a "scrap of paper," serves as a shield defending propertied interests from the rage of the workers...
...Offto the prestigious Carlyle Hotel...
...Children in crisp private-school uniforms parading with their model boats...
...roared John, weaving through the midtown traffic...
...Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Sally's most satisfying, intimate relationship is with Valdi, her dog...
...She certainly prefers Valdi s company to that of her husband: "When [Jason] leaves on Sunday night I dance through the empty rooms in my underwear with Valdi scampering behind me...
...Congress, as Lenin said of England's Parliament, is a "rich men's club...
...The genuinely erotic description is a mysterious thing...
...Cheever and Sally Gardens, but more telling is the boastfully confessional, Erica Jonglike "look what a naughty girl I am" quality of the novel...
...Moreover, behind Sally Garden's arrogance and exhibitionism lies a good bit of anger and resentment...
...CONSTITUTIONAL INTERRELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS OF THE USA IN THE SPHERE OF FOREIGN POLICY Yuri I. Nyporko / Naukova Dumka / 95 Kopeks Albert L. Weeks Z a d i t i o n a l l y , Kremlin ideologists have depicted American "bourgeoisdemocratic" political institutions as charades for deluding the masses...
...The reflecnons of the Fifth Avenue penthouses in the Central Park sailboat pond where I walk Valdi...
...He was asleep...
...Charity is no longer saintly either...
...The Salvation Army Bands on the corners at Christmas time...
...Inevitably he is left, like Jason, pauperized by alimony and vegetarian by necessity...
...Through Sally Gardens, Susan Cheever shows herself to be not so much the exponent of feminism as its logical product, a result of the contemporary attack on the family and the replacement of the sacrament of marriage with the structures of the marketplace...
...I am embarking on a search for the perfect bar...
...Some writers describe food in such a way as to inspire hunger in even the most sated after-dinner reader...
...As the 1960s progressed, the besheniye were seen to err in thinking that, in the face of the "changed correlation of forces in favor of Socialism" internationally, Communist-backed "offensives against the positions held by imperialism" (cant in Soviet writings on strategy since 1965, when Brezhnev first pronounced it) could be stopped...
...Who knows, but one certainly pities the poor male who falls into such a web...
...We push toward the bar and without asking what I want to drink, Max orders two Chivas Regals straight up...
...I'm not very tough, if you must know, but that's a secret...
...How can you feel, and how can you make them feel, that their presence alone is worth money to you...
Vol. 13 • April 1980 • No. 4
