Three Not So Ladylike Novelists

...Another new English novel...

...unwanted house guest, the 21-year-old Arbela, whose horrible jet-set mother was once married briefly to Edmund's father Arbela is a beautiful and sharp-witted waif thrown out of more schools than she can remember, a nuisance to her mother??who looks like the Botticelli Venus and talks with the terrifying candor of characters m Ivy Compton-Burnett Desperately hungry for love and devotion, Arbela not so innocently proceeds to threaten the Cornhill??s' cozy Eden of low-keyed erotic domesticity by becoming first Edmund's lover, then Anne's Yet finally they link forces to shut the seductive intruder out of their fortress, and settle back into the smug ruts of habit A neatly ironic scheme, certainly But the very neatness is what makes Miss Howard's book lightweight Everything is worked out with such tidy precision that the ambiguity of human motives and experience??what fiction is all about—is forgotten The fact that both Arbela and Anne discover in themselves the sexual versatility of an androgynous minx seems more a manipulative detail of plot than a credible aspect of character Moreover, Miss How aid, for all her shrewd wit, is one of those maddeningly instructive novelists who tell you far more about cooking, gardening, flower-arranging, and restaurant service than you want to learn, at least from a novel Not only do her characters manage to eat and drink with formidable appetite no matter how distraught and dejected they may feel, we are also told what they ate, how it was cooked and served, and which wines washed it down The jacket copy tells us, unnecessarily, that Miss Howard is a great cook But she does too much of her writing in the kitchen...

...she merely thinks she is thinking Though she is addicted to generalization, she has no answers...

...Writers & Writing THREE NOT SO LADYLIKE NOVELISTS BY PEARL K BELL Does anyone remember that only 16 years ago Mary McCarthy was considered extremely daring because in an otherwise merely feline novel, A Charmed Life, she described a sexual encounter clinically7 In those days women writers usually left that kind of un-lovingly explicit scrutiny of groping and coupling to the men, whether schlagmasters like Harold Robbins or dedicated supermalls like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer These days, even so fundamentally ladylike a writer as Elizabeth Jane Howard can give the hard-breathing boys a run for their money When it comes to writing about sex, women have indeed been liberated, though whether they've made any esthetically commendable use of their freedom is another question altogether...

...Anne and Edmund Cornhill, an agreeable if faintly pompous couple m their 30s, are childless by choice and inordinately content with their upper-middle-class English lot—a suburban house done with cautiously self-satisfied good taste, a well-tended garden, an ardent though well-mannered sex life Suddenly, their insulated serenity is threatened by the appearance of an...

...When Thinking Girl was first published in England four years ago, a lot of its aggressive lewdness was censored, the American publisher is of course making much of the fact that the bowdlerized passages have been restored But this is no Olympia Press pornography Thinking Girl is certainly the most sexually brutal book by a woman I have ever read, yet there is method to Miss Peacock??s lubricity, and it has little to do with prurience...

...In her frantic search for the man who will "salvage and endorse her," Fortune moves herself and her battery of synthetic allure to Dionysus West, a Los Angeles apartment complex for "young singles" Naturally the first day she minces down to the pool, Kleenex carefully stuffed into the top of her bathing suit, someone pushes her into the water and she leaves a wake of soggy paper Miss Buchanan is first-rate at this kind of set-piece, the reduction ad absurdum of Nathanael West's southern California, and the broad satiric devices in the first half of Maiden work beautifully Then the book goes to pieces, however, because she doesn't know what to do with her aging Barbie doll For no reason, we are asked to believe that Fortune is not altogether a caricature of a monstrous American dream, but a person of some tragic dignity Miss Buchanan shifts her focus and purpose without cause, and the metamorphosis is indigestible Predictably, since violence is the easiest form of drama, Maiden ends with an act of insanely gratuitous murder that is as phony as Fortune's Kleenex bosom Yet the first half of the book is such a fine comic performance that Miss Buchanan's gifts are unarguable She has a merciless eye and ear for indigenous American absurdity, and they should in tune take her much further than she allows herself to go in Maiden...

...Norma Peacock??s Think in Girl (Dial, 254 pp , $5 95), is as perversely messy as Odd Girl Out is compulsively neat Miss Peacock is a powerful, erratic, sexually bludgeoning writer, and an absolute original It is hard to resist a novel that opens " 'Tell me about Wittgenstein,' I begged " Lindy-Look, the young woman who makes this singular request of the man she has just met in an antiwar march, is a would-be picaresque heroine determined to "engage in experience at a certain level??and that the highest " But this isn't quite the way things work out Instead, she flounders through a variety of sexual adventures in mod London, frequently repellent and pleasure less No matter how bizarre the sexual whirlpool she drops into, she holds on to her thinking lifeline tenaciously and is often hilariously detached from her orgiastic participations As Lindy-Look writes in the notebook that is the only fixed point of her strangely offhand existence "Life is the gradual realization of, and/or identification with, that true goal, true orientation, one of which each of us has/is Adler is right My goal, beyond dispute, is abstract, intellectual To Think About The World ". Lmdy-Loo starts out as a lesbian who is secretly curious about men but knows nothing about them When a lascivious old sculptor later tries to seduce her, she muses "I wondered what Simone Weil would do " Another lover excites her because "he's a greater thinker than I have to love a thinker because the taproot that nurtures me in terms of which alone I am to be classified, is will-to-understand Not 'reality,' 'what it all means,' but 'what can be asked ' Perhaps I should get up an hour earlier every mooring to study symbolic logic " But for all her severely intellectual resolutions, she ends up impetuously marrying a pretentious scoundrel whose scholarly lifework is The Monograph on obscene graffiti, what he calls "folk epigraphy " Stuck m her middle-class trap with a baby and a husband who reviles her, deceives her and even beats her, Lindy-Look hits her stnde in the monumentally savage quarrels that rage through the last third of Thinking Girl—shocking, bitter, funny clashes of scatological invective and involuntary lust, in the heat of which she poignantly continues to persuade herself that she is really free, though her feet are m the mire, her head is "raised to catch the last breath of high seriousness ". Miss Peacock dazzlingly sustains the incongruous balance between Lindy-Lou??s mockingly overwrought sexual rapacity and her coolly insolent and witty gloss on the psychopathology of her everyday life In the end, Lindy-Look makes an uneasy truce with the ties that bind her, body and Bram, to stubborn earth "It's the pattern, I mused There's sex and comfort and ennui and weariness and hope And so on Same For everybody But no progress No leaps No Nijinsky??s in the ethical class " Thought remains the refuge, a metaphor of freedom But Lindy-Look is honest enough to know that thought is sometimes only fantasy, and that often...

...f Lindy-Lou??s pointedly ineffectual philosophizing seems peculiarly English, Fortune—prenounced For-tune—Dundo, in Cynthia Buchanan's Maiden (Morrow, 212 pp , $5 95), is a quintessential American grotesque An anachronistic forgery of impossible romanticisms, Fortune is a direct literary descendant of Alice Adams Like Tarkington's provincial visionary, Fortune shrouds her awkwardly grandiose yearning in pathetic lies and transparent affectations At 30, she is still a virgin, and the burden of chastity has heavy on her movie-bred soul She is a born loser, unbearably lonely and irrationally optimistic, with a patchwork identity ineptly pieced together from faded Loretta Young movies and love-story magazines She is a 20th-century plastic Don Quixote whose armor is made of mail-order organdy and sequins, and the knight's lance has shriveled to an eyelash curler...

...Miss Howard is a prolific British writer of considerable, if doggedly minor talent whose sixth novel, Odd Gull Out (Viking, 276 pp , $6 95), teeters uncertainly on the line between Iris Murdoch's intricate comedies of sexual manners and straight soap Her new book is cleverly plotted and written with brisk fluency, but her judgments, unhappily, are so mechanical and obvious that in the end, despite all the sexual hanky-panky and Murdoch an role-changing, she seems to trivialize and constrain her imaginative intelligence rather than follow its lead...