Judith Rossner's Turnaround
Podhoretz, John
John Podhoretz JUDITH ROSSNER'S TURNAROUND August is about coming to terms with the world. American literature tends toward the bizarre, the Gothic. From Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, with its...
...In J.D...
...insignificant subject with which Dawn begins her sessions (from a fight with her college roommate to her disgust with a Burger King on Broadway) becomes an excuse for Dr...
...If you think I can handle Tom's leaving me now, you're wrong...
...Goodbar, is the story of a prim Catholic girls-school teacher who turns into a singles-barcarouser at night and is, in the end, murdered for her transgressions...
...In this fashionable, upper middle-class New York, wealthy women leave their husbands for ex-convicts and everyone either needs or is a psychoanalyst...
...Shine-feld, that "if I showed [boys] what's inside my head they wouldn't want to have anything to do with me...
...I don't even know what I have been talking about...
...It is more difficult to make the ordinary seem extraordinary...
...Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," for example, a fellow who happily plays with a little girl on a beach and then puts a bullet through his head is not too good to die, but too good to live...
...But she is convinced, as she explains to Dr...
...I took it for granted...
...With a Chekhovian gift for compression, Rossner lays out the facts of Dawn's life in a few spare pages at the opening...
...She is twice-divorced, the mother of three, and she has made a hopeless bollix of her life...
...What is is intolerable...
...August,* her new best-seller, is a moral triumph of a kind...
...She called Vera Daddy, Tony Mommy...
...it is, after all, how and where Lulu Shinefeld lives...
...Every tiny, *Houghton Mifflin, $15.95...
...Like many of her contemporaries, Rossner has wallowed in violence and the unnatural, without ever lifting her novels beyond a certain chic pessimism and nihilism...
...in her office Lulu seems quite godlike...
...Rossner refuses to paint a rosy picture of that August...
...And one of the most important lessons Dawn learns-and Lulu as well-is that just as one can never escape one's past, one can never remove oneself from such a landscape...
...they are members of "that vast army of anxious single women whom the changing times had mobilized along the landscape...
...August is about coming to terms with the world, not rejecting it...
...Her mother committed suicide when she was six months old...
...Dawn's five-year analysis is over...
...It is quite clear from the outset that Dawn takes nothing at all for granted about her upbringing...
...But the author makes it clear that it is the only real choice, and it is a measure of her accomplishment that we feel not a shred of nostalgia for the crazier, messier Dawn...
...Unlike most people who make their regular jaunts to the couch and unlike most of Lulu Shinefeld's other patients, Dawn is in desperate need of aid...
...She is better at the end than at the beginning, and in some odd way Lulu Shinefeld is better for having known and helped her...
...she rarely talks during their sessions, only asks questions...
...She is by turns petty, emotional, cool, intelligent, and stupid, as her rambling, associative comic-monologues demonstrate: It's a good thing I'm numb, that's all...
...She was raised by her Aunt Vera and Vera's lesbian lover, Tony, in a small Vermont town...
...She reveals both the mundane and the hidden facts of her life through her own confused, often dishonest words to Lulu Shinefeld...
...Outside her office is another story...
...Lulu's second marriage, to an irreproachably responsible but severely dull fellow psychoanalyst, ended in a bitter divorce...
...The most sympathetic character in Irving's The World According to Garp is a lady named Roberta Muldoon who, only a few years earlier, was Bobby, tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles...
...Dawn's fear of the real world-represented in the novel by the month of August, when she and all other patients must live without their psychiatrists-is in some sense justified...
...Her experience is the cautionary example of the book...
...what isn't, perhaps even what shouldn't be, is divine...
...I guess I'm protecting myself, the way I did...
...It took forty years, but the nineteenth-century transcen-dentalist philosopher Margaret Fuller finally did decide to accept the universe...
...Have you noticed how numb I am...
...That requires a moral imagination: the ability to create characters at once individual and yet believable (the sort of character who makes one think, "This is my life as well") and to contrive a plot that seems inexorable and yet full of meaning (the sort of plot that makes one think, "This is what I would do if faced with such a problem...
...Something remarkable, however, has happened to Judith Rossner...
...she has grown up around people who have given her no sense of how the world really works...
...But if Lulu leads an unsatisfying life, she can at least take solace in the fact that she has brought Dawn Henley into the light...
...The world we see through Lulu Shinefeld's eyes is hardly an attractive one...
...The result has most often been disastrous: it is as though these authors have accepted at face value Henry James's condemnation of the "thinness" of John Podhoretz is a Reporter-Researcher at Time magazine...
...When the doctor terminates her analysis, she has a nearly fatal auto accident, which propels her into Lulu Shinefeld's office...
...From Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, with its odd plot about mesmerism, to the work of Southern writers like Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, almost exclusively concerned with the detritus of human nature, and on to John Irving's tongueless women and fellated cas-tratoes, American writers have celebrated the outlandish and ignored the everyday...
...When she was thirteen, Vera and Tony parted, Tony married, and Dawn had her first serious accident when her bicycle careened into a car...
...The novel concludes in July...
...If I don't talk about it all the time it's because I can't stand to...
...Do you have a daughter...
...See how out of it I am...
...she must "walk out of this office forever and into August...
...Her most famous novel, Looking for Mr...
...Actually, I wish I could be here to begin with and not have to come...
...At least most people would think so...
...Her patient is Dawn Henley...
...In all such fiction the idea of accepting what does exist-and the concomitant task of describing and dissecting what exists-is profoundly repugnant...
...Dawn's discoveries are difficult and time-consuming, and are nearly impossible to describe because they fit into an overall jigsaw puzzle that comes clear only at the end of the novel...
...Dawn is presented to us in a very tricky way: we never see her outside the doctor's office...
...Lulu gets involved in a rather ruinous affair with yet another analyst, an attractive, boyish man who ends up confusing her life even more...
...In a series of tour-de-force set pieces, Rossner simultaneously shows us the workings of a successful, almost ideal psychoanalysis and creates a most memorable character in Dawn Henley...
...I don't even come here every day...
...There is a reason why these writers question the universe...
...They reject the sane for the insane, the hale for the halt...
...American life and have sought to enhance their work by being "imaginative" in the most unimaginative sense...
...Shinefeld to begin probing at the major causes of Dawn's troubles...
...her father died in a boating accident a year later...
...They're not books or statues . . . Life isn't a problem that gets solved...
...Dawn Henley has good reason to want Lulu Shinefeld for a mother...
...Lulu's life is a litany of endless cocktail parties and conversations, during which everyone is so terribly concerned to do the right thing that he only does wrong...
...Her daughter Sascha, the offspring of her first marriage to a Greenwich Village Stalinist, "capped an adolescence that was like a black comedy of the sixties by running away from home shortly before she was due to graduate from the only private school in Manhattan that could have imagined giving her a diploma...
...Most of the novel takes place in the chic Manhattan office of Lulu Shine-feld, a psychiatrist...
...Lulu is a model Freudian analyst...
...American writers still seem to be debating the point...
...I come here every day just because...
...And her experience with Dawn makes it possible for her to come to terms with her prodigal daughter...
...The most extraordinary thing about this very good novel is that it turns all of Rossner's, and her fashionably nihilistic colleagues', ideas about normality and abnormality on their head...
...Suffice it to say that Dawn's unconventional life is the source of her great troubles...
...These works apotheosize the unusual and grotesque, and belittle the lives of those who are not blessed with six fingers, or a malformed leg, or any number of physical or spiritual deformities...
...It's wishful thinking...
...When the novel begins, Dawn is eighteen, a tall, beautiful blonde who is irresistibly attractive to men...
...Lulu and Dawn share at least one thing...
...It is very easy to invent extraordinary situations by populating them with unusual characters and unrealistic events...
...Dawn tells the psychiatrist that her past is "pretty crazy...
...As she tells Dawn near the end of the analysis, "People don't get finished...
...August is an exemplary depiction of how extraordinary ordinary people can be...
...This began her sessions with a middle-aged psychiatrist with whom she fell passionately in love...
...Judith Rossner has always seemed to be a member of this school...
...Dawn's love and affection for her is well-earned...
...Rossner's work has been relentlessly depressing: her characters are always divorced from the ordinary, and they are punished for it by a cruel universe...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
