The Dancer and the Dance
MILLER, STEPHEN
The Dancer and the Dance I AM MARY DUNNE By Brian Moore Viking. 224 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by STEPHEN MILLER Contributor, the New York "Times Book Review" "I am mary dunne," the woman of that...
...We see less of her and more of what she remembers...
...for example, her first marriage with Jimmy Phelan, a strange elopement...
...then there are too many descriptions of her "Down Tilts" and her "Juarez Dooms," too much attention paid to her shakings and tremblings, as if the novelist has to continually reassure us of the reality of her crisis...
...The thousand strands of Mary's memory that cause her nightmare are interwoven smoothly into the narrative...
...That Mary Dunne is dead...
...Janice is a debased version of Mary...
...everyone she meets that day seems to relate to her present crisis...
...Second, the subject matter smacks either of woman's magazine fiction or of overused psychoanalytic couches...
...Reviewed by STEPHEN MILLER Contributor, the New York "Times Book Review" "I am mary dunne," the woman of that name says three times in the last sentence of Brian Moore's sixth novel...
...It sags only when Mary ruminates about herself...
...Confused and guilt-ridden again, she violently asserts her maiden name...
...Nevertheless, the two living nightmares that Mary encounters (the other one is a buffoon named Ernest Truelove) convince us of the nightmare of her memory...
...At one point during one of Janice's scenes in Central Park, Mary sees an old man who looks like Freud and she imagines the man whispering to his wife, "Paranoia, liebchen, ja, ja...
...At the end, however, Mary has been swayed only by the menace of her two old friends' memories...
...Moore is an elegant and sophisticated writer whose novel has an economy of phrase and structure...
...and she tries to find out who she is through a process she calls memento ergo sum, a phrase out of her schoolgirl past...
...These two people are casual friends but they bring back real and bitter memories...
...The first episode, with a woman named Janice Sloane, is the best thing in the book...
...In this comic and moving work Mary still does not realize that one cannot know the dancer from the dance...
...This phrase, I take it, is what she should learn from her ransacked memory, and it is supported by a Yeats quotation that Moore uses as an epigraph: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance...
...Her problems, unlike Mary's, are of the woman's magazine variety and, in a French restaurant, she flirts with men at another table as she "analyzes" her marriage...
...it delineates, too, the hatred and jealousy that people from the provinces have for those who have "made it" in New York...
...Oh, look...
...Can we listen to a woman's true confessions for 224 pages...
...Sex in this novel is quite explicit, but it is thematically important and never works as fashionable decoration...
...Janice says while they are walking, and interrupts her intense self-analysis to run after a famous actress...
...In her attempt to understand herself through understanding her past, she comes to realize that "there doesn't have to be any purpose...
...The whole episode is full of the crazy dislocations of life in New York: Janice's recognition of the actress, Mary and Janice's cab ride into Central Park with a driver who gabs about a murder, their stumbling upon a tv commercial being filmed in the park, and finally Janice's confession that all she wants from Mary is advice on where to buy an expensive fur coat...
...It describes the peculiar uneasiness of a meeting with someone who belongs to the past and should have stayed there...
...Terence Lavery, Martha, and Maria...
...Moore has taken several risks in writing this novel...
...Her two casual friends not only are unpleasant in themselves but they also indirectly force her to remember the ugly parts of her past, especially the guilt she feels for leaving her sexually inadequate second husband...
...And jargon sometimes intrudes when Mary speaks of the "dichotomy" in her between her "Mad Twin" and "Sensible Self...
...Moore's work avoids these banalities mainly because the author never lets the reader stay within Mary's mind for too long...
...First, he keeps the focus narrow by allowing the woman to tell her own story in the first person...
...Playing her soap opera part with the bravado of a third-rate actress, Janice is Moore's most effective creation...
...And well she might, for this thrice-married woman who has traveled the long road from the provinces of Nova Scotia to the East Side of New York has been called, in the course of the novel, Mary Phelan, Mary Hatfield, Mrs...
...Who is she, she wonders, when she gives the wrong name to her hairdresser...
...Mary's paranoia, unlike Janice's staged variety, is real...
...There is a madness," she muses, "autopsychosis, a disorder in which all ideas are centered around oneself...
...They were supposed to drive a rich, mentally-retarded 40-year-old to see his mother in Toronto, but lost him on the way...
...She wants to get even with her philandering husband so she comes to New York to have an affair...
...And banality when Mary laments, "—but where is that me who once wrote stories...
...And Mary's memory is horribly aided by two encounters she has with casual friends who rise up, alive and menacing, out of the ashes of her past...
...Mary's recollections come through bright and clear—her days in Toronto living with a Dickensian couple and her day in Ciudad Juarez obtaining a divorce from her second husband...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 19
