World Without End

...It is just that: the lives she tells about ring with authenticity for their times and their place...

...The world of the title is not so much endless as Vicovian, cyclical, the rise and fall and rise again of love, of aesthetic movements, fidelities and successes, failures and dissatisfactions...

...It is a notable social history, to my mind, more than a compelling story...

...Despite the spread of time in which they live and the amount of history in our time which surrounds them, they remain predictable, even stereotypic in their undeviating natures...

...Edmund Richter (called Eddem, a pet name, for everyone in the novel has a pet name) is an emigre whose great love is the beautiful and eccentric Mara, his mother...

...They move across continents and hemispheres of class, national origins, poverty, success, dissatisfaction, and rebellion against the present and the inherited past, thus involving a complete contemporary culture in their lives...

...But the bond among the three heroes, from their adolescence on Nantucket to their tour of the Soviet Union in June 1975 and into the present, is unbreakable...

...Doris Grumbach IF ONE were given to reviewing by bestowing genre-labels one might call Francine Gray's second novel (her first was the highly-regarded Lovers and Tyrants, 1976) a prime entry in the novel of intelligence...

...At forty-five they are still looking for themselves, or "finding themselves" in the odious phrase of the sixties, learning that what they were is what they are and will be-Sophie's warm but self-contained ambition, Claire's selfless service to mankind, Edmund's reactionary devotion to his mother, his art, his two friends, himself...

...Having borne witness to every kind of human need and cause, Claire's newest choice is another piece of evidence of her undeviating character...

...The other is Claire (called Pebble or Peb), daughter of "Babsie" and "Plinker" Sanford, an American aristocrat who slakes her guilt at being born into privilege by wholehearted social action...

...Gray has used them as catafalques on which to hang what has gone on in the United States in the middle decades of this century and, as a result, it seems to me, has lost the kind of intensity one looks for in the novel...

...We know the trio well soon after the novel begins, we watch their forays into one experience after another, representing the major currents of twentieth-century American thought, to paraphrase V. L. Parrington, and then we settle back comfortably with them into middle-age, believing with them that "after the age of forty there isn't much to live for except friendship.'' Despite the impressive and always accurate documentation of place (Edmund's visit to the Hermitage and the art he looks at there consumes five dense pages) and character, social movements, parental backgrounds, lovers, husbands, visits with each other, letters and postcards they exchange for all those years, do we ever feel close to these people...

...We know that it, like the others before, will pass into the generalized concern that defines her until the last page...

...There are changes in their lives, but their natures remain very much the same...

...Claire and Sophie love each other as many women do...

...Most of the action is composed by the lives of two women and a man...

...Francine Gray would be the first to admit that the novel is about the changelessness of personality, I am sure, and yet this keeps us from experiencingany surprises...

...His (Continued on page 308)A novel of intelligence (cont...

...World Without End is an engrossing but static book, violating the horizontal progress of most fiction by the dense, vertical views of the three friends...

...Sophie has loved Edmund since she was fifteen: "She'd accepted the evident certainty of his love for Claire with a cool, complicated patience which had to do with her own adoration of Pebble...

...Since that lifelong obsession is the subject-matter of the book, one does not expect much "to happen," and of course it does not...

...She explains to the visiting Edmund: "The reality of my need for the sacred suddenly became greater than my need for any proof of its existence...

...We are not even surprised when Claire enters, briefly, a convent...

...her "diversity of causes . . . expresses an almost frivolous abundance of dissenting passions...

...They are so detailed and so cerebral, their talk is so elevated and informed, we know so many facts about their milieus that, somehow, passion is smothered in them...

...Curiously, not really...

...once in Russia Edmund walks in upon them: . . . they were lying in a large double bed, Claire reading half reclining on a pillow, Sophie bared to the waist, her head on Claire's lap, trying to have a brief afternoon sleep, splendor of two women's flesh joined in ancient affection, sensuality of sheets rumpled in great heat...

...It is about three persons who are created at great length and depth-but do not live.pth-but do not live...

...One of those friends is Jewish Sophie Ross who marries into extraordinary wealth and then loses a second, Israeli, husband in a Lebanese border skirmish...

...Continued from page.306) fidelities are to Mara, to painting (which he abandons when the tastes of the country change from realism to pop art) and to the two friends he makes at fifteen on Nantucket...

...While the three travel together in the Soviet Union, Edmund reflects "on the dilemma facing three persons in middle age who've had a lifelong obsession for each other...

...Sophie, Claire, and Edmund live their lives separately at times, but always in touch...

...It is a complex thirty-year friendship...

...Claire marries Jeff, a teacher who is a tennis buff, they have a daughter who grows up with her mother's conscience and studies for the Episcopal ministry, and then Jeff dies, freeing Claire for Edmund...

...Sophie's two marriages are passages she lives through in order to free her for her enormously successful television life (in some respects resembling Barbara Walters's...

...The three who are her heroes love each other and are held together by their participation in all the artistic, intellectual, religious, and psycho-sexual movements of the American twentieth century...

...And so I needed to bear witness to it...