Disturbances in the Field:

...When Ivan presents his question - Why do the innocent suffer...

...Why do children die...

...This is the beautiful neo-Platonic lie of fiction: like Lydia Rowe, we understand our lives only dimly and we despair, but through her, we know our condition...

...Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it...

...It has the total quality of reality, in all its untidiness and muddlement and mulish resistance to logic and formula...

...And up to a point, the novel functions partly as a So-cratic disquisition, in that the characters within their dialogues can answer as well as ask questions about knowledge and ethics...

...She cannot respond to her own tragedy, except by spraining an ankle, so she can relish the small physical pain that substitutes for the other one...

...Lydia Rowe introduces herself on the first page like this: "I was nearly forty-two and still seeking to understand...

...The second, less cosmically poetic semester disappoints the girls, who, even after reconstituting themselves years later as The Philosophy Study Group, remain dismayed by the rigors of Abelard and William James and as distressed by Lydia's sometime predilection for the pessimism of Schopenhauer as by Esther's inexplicable turn first for guruism, then for Ecclesiastes...

...Continued from page 590) succeed, he argued, it must first and last impress us by its "air of reality...

...This is also the essay that presents James's vision of the novel as a house with many windows, and a strong reaf-firmation of his 1884 "The Act of Fiction," which controverted the idea that a novel requires a high moral purpose...

...Dostoevsky lets us off the philosophical hook by allowing man to accuse God...

...Schwartz traces the respective fates of the four friends from their undergraduate aspirations through the vicissitudes of young adulthood, as they marry, or don't, or survive divorce, take up careers or drop them, quarrel or make peace with aging parents, have or don't have children more by accident than by choice...

...At the same time, if none of them is entirely content with her lot, their lives proceed out of their respective "essences," and The Philosophy Study Group sustains them, particularly by its Aristotelian article of faith that "a friend is another self...

...By the time we leave her, everything, and nothing, has happened to the presumptuous girl who sought the truth in philosophy and found her destiny in the lives, and deaths, of other people...

...Four well-delineated and familiar representatives of the restless sixties and confused seventies, they are distinguished primarily by their talk (for this is a novel full of good talk) and their collective inquiry into what any of this- career, marriage, maternity-has to do with philosophy...

...In a freak accident, Lydia's two youngest, and most beloved, children are killed...

...it is a splendid, fiery, awesome moment in fiction, such terrifying high tragedy that we end with a certain satisfied pride in our own intellect and humanity...

...Already off-center in a chaotic, unsatisfactory world, Lydia now withdraws from feeling, becomes a frigid observer of the events around her...

...By indicting Him for His cruelty, we subsume His mercy and obtain our own freedom...

...The speaker here is Henry James, the occasion one of the prefaces to the 1916 New York edition of Portrait of a Lady, and the slight personality is Isabel Archer, whose sensible confrontation of her destiny comprises one of the exemplary novels of the English language...

...Carole Cook . . . By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?-and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated...

...It's what they have, we expect them to say, instead...

...In its size and its freedom, it achieves the "immense and exquisite correspondence with life" that James maintained was the stuff and soul of fiction...

...Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Disturbances in the Field is just such a novel as Henry James would have approved, being not so much a story, moral or otherwise, as the execution of an entire, unique world out of a generous accumulation of detail, character, and incident...

...Lydia's erstwhile lover and friend George, a skirt-chasing shrink, proposes a cool, dispassionate theory, derived from physics, to account for their eternal dissatisfaction...

...Presumptuous indeed, Lydia is not content merely to live - she wants to understand as well, and it is ultimately as a seeker of wisdom that she constitutes herself as a worthy Subject...

...The triumph, if we want one, belongs not to her heroine but to the novelist herself, who transforms the life of her character and her bootless search for truth into the truth of that search...

...By contrast, Schwartz underplays the situation, and brutally so...

...She indicts her friends, accusing them of abandoning her in her hour of need...

...They couldn't be further from the tired sensibility of Ann Beattie's emotional drifters, but they share the winter of her discontent...

...But then Schwartz toser heroine the ultimate question - the hard one by which Ivan Karamazov's cynicism prevails over his brother Alyosha's faith...

...Philosophy 101, which provides a kind of leitmotif for the book is heavy on the Greeks, from Thales to Aristotle...

...At forty-two, Lydia has it all, that is to say, everything the average middle-class American girl aspires to: a devoted husband, a rising career as a chamber musician, four beautiful children, and a close-knit group of loving friends...

...If she has learned anything, it is only that no one has permission to go under, and seeking is its own business...

...In the absence of a belief in God," according to Wallace Stevens, "the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support they give...

...It is a novel in which an intensely rich and complex scene radiates out from the hub of its subjective center...

...It begins, like the Portrait, from the premise that ordinariness is far more interesting than the exotic...

...Her best friends - Nina, Gaby, and the formidable Esther - date from her Barnard years, where they first tasted the fruit of knowledge together in a philosophy survey course...

...Briefly, George explains that no sooner is one need of the organism satisfied than another, more urgent one arises to replace it...

...This endless succession of needs and desires creates "disturbances" in the "field" of their lives, ergo, happiness, or even stasis, is impossible...

...She loses her husband along with her will to live, and finally regains both by clinging tenaciously to the ancient, somewhat ragged shards of Philosophy 101...

...It is precisely in all the "ado" of Disturbances in the Field-the swirl of events surrounding this one passionate, vital, intelligent but altogether ordinary individual and her insistence, to paraphrase James again, on mattering-that the novel finds its justification...

...If the novel cannot explain reality, it can nonetheless embody its frustrations and limitations...

...To (Continued on page 601) Disturbances in the field (cont...