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...
...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...
...As a literary critic, Doris Grumbach produces some extremely fine lyrical writing, mostly descriptive and introspective...
...Yet it was there, in that curious moment...
...They are also much the same novel...
...read for other than historical reasons 50 years hence...
...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...
...Ghamber Music is no improvement...
...But their efforts, though admirable, have hardly been stellar...
...Despite the excellence of their critical prose, they seem unable to produce as well in fiction...
...The same, alas, is true of Doris Grum-bach...
...She takes refuge in a homosexual love affair of her own, with the young, buxom nurse who has helped with the dying Robert...
...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 recounts their rather brief life together, her tragic loneliness, his death, and the love affair she begins shortly after she is widowed...
...His wife Caroline is his unfortunate adjunct, delicate, passive, haunted by her inadequacies, trapped in her unhappy marriage...
...Robert Maclaren, the composer, is a loveless man whose only passion is to write, perform, and listen to music...
...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...
...But as a novelist she still struggles to make a half-told story a well-wrought piece of fiction...
...The first two, Spoil of the Flowers and The Short Throat, The Tender Mouth, were published one after the other in the early 1960s...
...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...
...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...
...Wolff has been to the well three times, Sheed eight...
...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...
...With this outcome Grumbach seems to forsake what moral order did exist in Caroline's benighted marriage...
...The current sprightliness of that magazine owes much to her stewardship...
...Though blind to her husband's homosexuality, she is battered by his indifference and finally numbed by the grotesque, syphilitic death she must attend...
...The novels are discouraging: pretentious rather than profound...
...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...
...Leonard has written four novels, and is working on a fifth...
...Both probe, somewhat melodramatically, such grim subjects as homosexuality and suicide...
...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...
...Chamber Music is her third novel...
...They are school novels, the first (written when Grumbach taught at the College of St...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Our best literary critics, people like John Leonard, Wilfred Sheed, Geoffrey Wolff, and Doris Grumbach, know this of course...
...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...
...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...
...She tells her story with little emotion and by book's end we must conclude that she is capable of little...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
