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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Hilarity...
...They perceived that America could no longer assert its power, and their favorite example was Vietnam, where the U.S...
...Ralph Nader was also given special commendation...
...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...
...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...
...Perhaps the most striking thing about Sally Gardens is her confusion, the whorl of undigested ideas knocking about inside her head...
...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...
...Hemingway, for one, comes to mind...
...Free, I am f r e e . " S a l l y doesn't actually do much looking for work...
...Realists, they said, could be found, even if rarely, in Congress...
...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...
...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...
...had attempted in vain to "roll back the inevitable course of history...
...As to Republicans and Democrats generally, they follow where the monopolists lead them...
...Angelo," the bartender says...
...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...
...I am very suggestible...
...He was asleep...
...Especially if you have no children, or if they are grown...
...It's hard to be tactful about having someone depend on you for money, I suppose...
...Others, with even the simplest description, induce nausea...
...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...
...Or ever love again at all, really...
...A glance at the dustjacket reveals some obvious points in common between Ms...
...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...
...Even so, they still stopped short of asserting that any profound contradictions between the executive and legislative organs of government could arise...
...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...
...roared John, weaving through the midtown traffic...
...Offto the prestigious Carlyle Hotel...
...They remained fundamentally the same: tools of big business and the Pentagon...
...Thank God you've gotten here," he says...
...In such a way do love affairs become job interviews...
...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...
...I'm not very tough, if you must know, but that's a secret...
...Is marriage just another exercise in acquisition, with markdowns on older models and racks of possible purchases displayed to their best advantage...
...And I," proclaimed Seymour, "I am looking for a man with no redeeming sense of social value...
...To fill time, Sally also tries to write...
...Such "prominent figures" understood the real balance of forces in the world...
...Especially now that we all think that money is power...
...Why do some people pay for other people if not in return for services rendered...
...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...
...Congress, as Lenin said of England's Parliament, is a "rich men's club...
...Yes, Mr...
...It reads very much like a diary, and an unexpurgated one at that...
...Redbook has excerpted it, the Literary Guild has chosen it an alternate selection, and Warner Brothers has bought up the movie rights...
...Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Sally's most satisfying, intimate relationship is with Valdi, her dog...
...I told you it would be boring...
...Susan Cheever's bedtime interludes, more than unerotic, are decidedly unpleasant...
...The reflecnons of the Fifth Avenue penthouses in the Central Park sailboat pond where I walk Valdi...
...In this sense "looking for work" is an appropriate title for her novel...
...The Salvation Army Bands on the corners at Christmas time...
...Charity is no longer saintly either...
...Mendicants are no longer saintly men...
...Clearly, the girl is bordering on a severe case of anomie...
...Such "Solons" might actually stand up to the President, even if he was of the same party...
...into the arms of a world famous sculptor...
...The same is true with sex...
...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...
...The separation of powers, writers still insisted, was "illusory...
...I am embarking on a search for the perfect bar...
...They might even sometimes speak out against the beslseniye, the "hotheads...
...One feels suddenly prudish and would "rather not know...
...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...
...If you are supporting another person financially, how can you justify it...
...The Constitution itself, a "scrap of paper," serves as a shield defending propertied interests from the rage of the workers...
...Children in crisp private-school uniforms parading with their model boats...
...We push toward the bar and without asking what I want to drink, Max orders two Chivas Regals straight up...
...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...
...But a new book, called simply Constitutional Interrelationships Be32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980...
...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...
...You've got me...
...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...
...How can you feel, and how can you make them feel, that their presence alone is worth money to you...
...obscures the exploitative character of the state.'" Such, anyway, was the message...
...Presidents function as mouthpieces o f " monopoly capitalism...
...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...
...Looking for V/'ork is a good example of this...
...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...
...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...
...What a boring person...
...Thus everything in the novel seems to be either a fashion plate or a cliche, the prefabricated articles of experience...
...Inevitably he is left, like Jason, pauperized by alimony and vegetarian by necessity...
...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...
...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...
...She swallows whole all the fashionable platitudes and cynicisms fed to her, but there is no mediating consciousness to make sense of them...
...Seymour, I think you've found him at last," said John in mock earnest voice...
...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...
...In American government, they claimed, there can be no genuine separation of powers, no checks and balances...
...Is this all there is to New York, or do the city's boundaries extend beyond the author's experience...
...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...
...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...
...The difference is hard to pin down, but the effect is unmistakable...
...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...
...In the middle of laughing I looked over at Jason sitting next to me in the back seat...
...And then Jason is often so unsure of himself, while Max is always in such perfect command...
...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...
...It's enough to drive any Joshua Gilder is a writer living in New York...
...Is courtship just another hype...
...Doesn't it make your toes tingle...
...So, too, is its opposite...
...Some writers describe food in such a way as to inspire hunger in even the most sated after-dinner reader...
...Imagine falling asleep during such lively conversation...
...The genuinely erotic description is a mysterious thing...
...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...
...Longlegged career girls bobbing to the bus these cool, early autumn mornings, and soon, snow falling softly on the skaters at Rockefeller Center...
...Head over heels over head" must be her favorite, guessing from the number of times she repeats it...
...Moreover, behind Sally Garden's arrogance and exhibitionism lies a good bit of anger and resentment...
...Cheever and Sally Gardens, but more telling is the boastfully confessional, Erica Jonglike "look what a naughty girl I am" quality of the novel...
...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...
...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...
...Their affair begins at a New York opening where, Sally's friend assures her, the other women will "all be practically naked...
Vol. 13 • April 1980 • No. 4
