This Femme Fatale:
HALE, HOPE
This Femme Fatale Incense to Idols. By Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Simon and Schuster. 312 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Contributor, "New Yorker," "Town and Country," "Saturday Review" Germaine...
...Because her father blamed her for the death of her mother at her birth...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Contributor, "New Yorker," "Town and Country," "Saturday Review" Germaine de Beauvais is a young, rich French widow, wearer of fabulous high-style models, avid connoisseur of male "playmates" and brilliant concert pianist...
...Look at my cute wee Baal...
...Perhaps...
...But the clergyman whose voice makes her "organs stand up and change places" does not seem immediately available...
...His reception of Germaine flatters her thirsty vanity, and she discovers he is able to satisfy needs other than musical, including the sado-masochistic...
...The femme fatale steals the husband of a woman who lies in the hospital critically ill with some mysterious disease of which the doctor admits he is powerless to cure her...
...Determined to add the mysterious missing essential to her playing, she follows the great M. Leon Montigney three-quarters of the way around the world from Paris to New Zealand, whence he has fled after being tried for the murder of a mistress...
...And why is the heroine so immoral and destructive...
...Perhaps that is what Helen of Troy was like...
...If it was extravagant praise which relaxed the author's vigilance, the reception of incense to Idols will not help her put her very considerable talents back to serious work again...
...In Spinster, Miss Ashton-Warner's first novel, she skirted this danger narrowly, thanks partly to the unusual heroine, a dedicated and gifted firstgrade teacher who had to take a stiff shot of brandy each morning before she could start work...
...Where in the earlier work one could forgive an occasional lapse of taste, a coy self-consciousness of manner, because the author seemed to be trying honestly to show what it was like to be a lonely woman longing for love, in this novel the strained effort to shock becomes repellent...
...Though the heroine is the carefully planned opposite of a spinster, she tells the same story of love hunger, but without the saving grace of a genuine awareness of other people...
...Yet the new book is disturbingly lacking in this very quality...
...Miraculously, due to her love for her three little children and her faith in their father's devotion, she seems about to recover, until she senses her husband's infidelity and loses what the author unblushingly calls "the will to live...
...In this quest she is—as her description of her own effect on men would guarantee—too successful for the good of the simple New Zealand community...
...In such a context, raw sex is hardly palatable...
...Well I think I'm wonderful...
...Incense to idols falls into every pitfall the method creates...
...Germaine is utterly, terribly real," says one critic...
...The lovingly literal records of what these Maori children did and said, comic on the surface while deeply moving in the pathos they revealed, won for Miss Ashton-Warner sudden recognition as a writer with the novelist's indispensable ability to feel herself into other human souls...
...Nevertheless she seeks supplementary "felicity" from such males as meet her standards of technique...
...That's the cleverest thing I've ever Oooh don't be so gloomy, we're awfully clever...
...There is nothing genuine, in fact, about the whole novel, except perhaps the New Zealand scenery...
...But what actually saved the story were the 70-odd small, lively characters who occupied her classroom and—one after another—her lap...
...It is to him that Incense to Idols is formally addressed...
...The frank, specific responses of this virgin to all the men who crossed her path, plus the shocking events of the novel with its ending of frustration and retreat, seemed to add up to reality...
...Holding her aborted foetus in a wine glass, Germaine asks, "Did I make a thing like that...
...Only by great vigilance can a writer keep such a book from sounding like the diary of a teen-age girl going through her period of most painful crushes...
...But in that case it really required a Homer to make her worth reading about...
...Telling a story in the words of a sex-obsessed woman neurotically preoccupied with what goes on inside herself has its dangers...
...All the cliches of romantic melodrama are present...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 3
