A Woman Run Mad:
Simon, Linda
THROUGH A BLOOD-STAINED LENS A WOMAN RDM NAD John L'Heureux Viking, $17.95, 258 pp. Undo Simon More than twenty years ago, when John L'Heureux was studying for his ordination as a Jesuit priest...
...It is an admirable thriller: L'Heureux tantalizes us with the gun until the final pages...
...His characters live at the periphery of society, without any sense of community...
...Quinn, a would-be novelist, was denied tenure at Williams College and cannot seem to get started either on his novel or on his proposed study of nineteenth-century American Catholicism...
...L'Heureux has larger issues in mind...
...And once it is used, how will this story be distinguished from such a mundane tale of lust and revenge as, say, Fatal Attraction...
...Quinn is a caricature of a repressed, sexually inexperienced man reveling in newly-discovered lust...
...His is a bleak vision, and A Woman Run Mad is a terrifying book...
...Angelo sometimes comes alive in these pages-L'Heureux has a masterly eye for the telling gesture-but his forays into literature and philosophy ultimately fall flat...
...But the characters are so essentially one-dimensional-short-story characters given too much room in the expanse of longer fiction-that we do not really believe in their struggles...
...Isaac, in "Something Missing," (from L'Heureux's early collection, Family Affairs, 1974) burns his coach's desk, but not before he carves ' 'I hate you" into the wooden top...
...It is in these philosophical interludes that the novel works least...
...It is a world peopled by emotional casualties, by outsiders...
...The white canvas on his tennis shoes was blood-stained and sticky...
...The affair, Sarah's sordid past, and Angelo's energetic pastimes afford an opportunity for plenty of kinky sex and plenty of blood...
...And then there is Claire...
...He sees Claire, the woman run mad, as a modern Medea...
...The mass crushed and slithered...
...And the novel becomes not merely a tale of passion, but an exploration of the philosophical premises by which we live...
...But it was action...
...Now, in A Woman Run Mad, L'Heureux pursues the violent once more, this time attempting his own Greek tragedy...
...He strode to the barn, with blood on his shoes...
...She and Angelo discuss grand philosophical issues...
...When we meet her, Claire is all intellect: a classical scholar given to Latin interjections, who is writing a book on the women in Euripides, who has a successful teaching career, who celebrates her cerebral relationship with her husband, Quinn, and who has just discovered that she is pregnant...
...Angelo Talli-no is a male prostitute, a homosexual with an insatiable desire for sex and with a philosophical passion for Camus and Kierkegaard...
...In the journals he kept before his ordination, L'Heureux copied a passage from Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, a particularly "horrific" passage, he says, about a snake choking on a toad, oozing blood, and being stamped upon and killed by the man who discovers the awful sight...
...And Claire-Claire is no Medea: she has none of the dark grandeur, even when she confronts the harrowing futility of an abortion...
...The image, said L'Heureux, was Woolf's symbol.''of the world as she saw it at the height of World War II...
...Sarah is so ethereal she threatens to evaporate...
...Her transition from good sport to vengeful fury appears too abrupt because we know so little about her...
...Against whom...
...It was the way you expressed yourself today," she concluded, "you shot somebody...
...L'Heureux's characters, often lonely, ostracized, unable to love, take desperate steps to communicate their silent rage...
...After his sister marries Sarah's brother, Angelo is given the task of being Sarah's bodyguard...
...Soon she discovers, too, that Quinn is having an affair with Sarah...
...Sarah Slade is a socialite who murdered her lover when he threatened to abandon her, and who now hovers at the edge of sanity, believing herself to be capable of destruction and malice beyond imagining...
...But by whom...
...Later, when his fiction was published, many stories would reflect this fascination with violence and with the grotesque...
...Leonora, in "Brief Lives in California" (Desires, 1981), breaks down extravagantly because an English teacher deems her "average.'' Her mother, responding to a world that includes Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, and hundreds of corpses in Guyana, decides to kill the unfortunate teacher...
...Undo Simon More than twenty years ago, when John L'Heureux was studying for his ordination as a Jesuit priest and writing (and publishing) poetry, he reported in his journal that Carolyn Kizer had written him, "telling me that all of my poems of the last year fail because they substitute violence for inspiration...
...Action relieved him...
...It is close to L'Heureux's vision of the world as he sees it at the end of the twentieth century, a world in which action-the more violent and grisly the better-brings a relief that cannot be achieved through introspection, communication, or love...
...There is also a gun, hidden under Kleenex, and it is bound to be used...
...Claire had been a fat, unattractive child, an outcast...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 12
