Marilee/To See You Again:
Phillips, Robert
Missed opportunities, endless possibilities MARILEE Elizabeth Spencer Univ. Press of Mississippi, $3.95, 64 pp. TO SEE TOO AGAIN Alice -Adams Knopf, $13.50, 305 pp. Robert Phillips THE...
...While the majority of her stories are set in California, where she now lives, others collected here are set in Mexico, Europe, the South, and Washington D.C...
...Adams is forgiven two misses...
...REVIEWERS msgr...
...I allude not to Robert Frost's famous poem (which merely posits the thesis but does not explore it...
...Port Claiborne, the ruined Windsor mansion, and even Foster Hamilton's drinking represent the unchanging in a changing world...
...To See You Again shows a widening of range and subjects, and an admirable ability to shift point-of-view from character to character...
...Adams at her best and worst...
...Reality" is no concrete thing in her imagination...
...Now we have Elizabeth Spencer's Marilee, a trilogy of stories centered upon a character about which the author states, in a foreword, "If I'd stayed put, there's a bare possibility, I like to imagine, that I might have been something like her...
...he could be as haunted as I am by everything that ever happened in his life...
...All three stories pit decorum against instinct, and are filtered through Marilee's ironic sensibility...
...He could be another sort of person altogether...
...We'd like to know what happened to Melissa after Uncle Hernan dies, why Uncle Andrew moves to Illinois, whether or not Uncle Rex has further dreams, and more...
...It is a more primitive tale than Ms...
...The other unsatisfactory story in the volume, curiously enough, is the title piece, which seems a sketch for a much longer story...
...The Mexican stories show Ms...
...It is as if the author needs the trappings and familiar actions of"civilization" to fully comprehend her characters' motivations...
...The story's epiphany concerns Marilee's encounter of the couple embracing...
...Her first collection, Beautiful Girl (1978), was intelligent and well-crafted, mostly stories about love...
...More recently John Updike's Rabbit trilogy contains a character very much like Updike himself had he never won a scholarship, left Pennsylvania, lived in London, and become a writer...
...By the end of the story, now an adult, he has found his surrogate family in the place he least expected to find them...
...The trilogy concludes with "Indian Summer," about the wildness still inherent in Marilee's Uncle Rex, despite his having settled down and married...
...Author Spencer indicates in the foreword that she may not be done with Marilee...
...after reconstructing the life of one Carstairs Jones, in"Truth or Consequences," she admits, "But of course I could be quite wrong about Car Jones...
...We hope not...
...GEORGE G. HIGGINS is adjunct lecturer in theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...
...It was there for good...
...Robert Phillips THE ROAD not taken: The theme occasionally gives rise to important art...
...In both "Lost Luggage" and "Berkeley House," serenity is achieved through great loss...
...At every corner he encounters the ghost of the self he might have become...
...Adams attempts to write of the unworldly that she gets into trouble...
...She is a highly knowledgeable writer of psychological states...
...Robert phillips's third collection of poetry, Running on Empty, was published last summer by Doubleday.ast summer by Doubleday...
...Her description of the pair of octogenarians who grace the Mexican resort reveals her visual command: The arrival of the elderly couple, down at the beach, at almost precisely noon each day, is much noticed...
...That blood was ours, mingling and twining with the other...
...Their awful racket seemed a part of me-near and powerful, realer than itself, like their living blood...
...Adams's usual story of quiet epiphanies - more Isak Dinesen than Elizabeth Bowen...
...As Spencer says,"There have got to be some things you can count on, would be an ordinary way to put it...
...The road not taken, with Spencer, is also the one held high in imagination, and that has made all the difference...
...In "Teresa" she tries to get under the skin of a Mexican native girl who suffers two tragedies...
...She suppresses and condenses, allowing the reader to make vital connections between situation and character...
...That possibility seems less bare than apparent...
...Alice Adams is not overly pessimistic...
...martin green teaches in the English department at Tufts University...
...In both "The Girl Across the Room" and "By the Sea," women become aware not only of missed opportunities, but also of life's endless possibilities...
...It pivots upon Marilee's courtship by one Foster Hamilton, young Southern gent who drinks because he likes to, but who can switch into sobriety at a moment's notice, usually whenever Marilee's mother approaches...
...it is when they look, perhaps, most splen...
...Adams accomplishes all this with great economy...
...Rather, I mean works such as Henry James's The Jolly Corner, in which the protagonist- clearly James-returns from London where he has lived for decades to explore the New York house he might have continued to inhabit...
...She then realizes that Melissa's four devilish children also are Uncle Hernan's, and her cousins: "I felt differently about them now...
...The second tale, "Sharon," is briefer but flares suddenly like a struck match...
...But in a big collection of nineteen stories, Ms...
...I'd rather say that I feel the need of a land, of sure terrain, of a sort of permanent landscape of the heart...
...Teresa is the least convincing protagonist in the book...
...We really do not know enough about the heroine's husband and marriage to understand his hold on her...
...Alice Adams knows the latter...
...When she writes of tourists or expatriates, she is marvelous, as in " At the Beach," a story of the uncertainties of older age (a theme she also explores in "A Wonderful Woman...
...He also has found the love of his life...
...In trim dark bathing suits, over which they both wear white shirts, in their hats and large dark glasses, advancing on their ancient legs, they are as elegant as tropical birds . . . It is when Ms...
...One of my favorites in the book is "At First Sight," in which a poor little rich boy spends his youth in his long room in a cold, modern odd-shaped house, telling himself stories in which he is the son of some very plain but substantial midwest-ern people who live in a big plain square house that was warm...
...These are among her finest stories...
...Sharon is the home to which Marilee's Aunt Eileen brings a black domestic upon marriage, like a dowry...
...The usual Adams character does not give in to his or her fate, but attempts to shape it, however misguidedly...
...William Blake said, You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough...
...TO SEE TOO AGAIN Alice -Adams Knopf, $13.50, 305 pp...
...For those who are not acquainted with Spencer's shorter fiction (collected abundantly in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Doubleday, $15.95) Marilee is a dandy place to begin...
...His books include The Challenge of the Mahatmas and Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire...
...Marilee (who dabbles in local real estate) might be Elizabeth Spencer had she not lived in Rome and Montreal, and written among other fine fictions The Light in the Piazza...
...Mama could kick like a mule, fight like a wildcat in a sack, but she would never get it out...
...The Break-In" is fashioned upon Oedipal rivalry, and "Related Histories" explores coincidence and similarity in the lives of separated lovers - Jung's synchronicity...
...A Southern Landscape," the first, introduces the reader to Marilee, her family, and the town of Port Claiborne, Mississippi...
...Alice Adams's stories have appeared in every O. Henry award collection for the past ten years - which must be something of a record...
...After Eileen's premature death, the black Melissa stays on, taking care of the house and-unknown to Marilee but known well enough by the family adults-taking care of all of Uncle Hernan's other needs besides...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 6
