The Classic Victim
SCHNEIDER, SUSAN
The Classic Victim The Western Coast By Paula Fox Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 333 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Susan Schneider Paula Fox's previous novel, Desperate Characters, was justly acclaimed in...
...The time is 1939 and the five eventful years that follow...
...the personality is that of 17-year-old Annie Gianfala...
...At the urging of a middle-aged spiritualist she meets at art school (one of a corps of freakish ancillary characters that crowd the book) she leaves the West Side for the West Coast...
...From the painful experience of rejected love, she is forced to a new self-awareness...
...Her "will," for much of the novel, is less an active force than a fierce restraint that leads her to "maintain silence, smile when questioned, ask nothing...
...She demonstrates no consciousness of any possibility of choice, seeing her own life ruled by chance...
...He tells her: "You can't wander around through a lifetime leaving everything an open question...
...Reviewed by Susan Schneider Paula Fox's previous novel, Desperate Characters, was justly acclaimed in these pages and elsewhere...
...The last chapters of the book describe their two-and-a-half-year affair, culminating in Annie's departure from Hollywood...
...Pathetic and confused, she receives information and instruction from every quarter, and cannot sort the input...
...This new, more ambitious book is still desperate, but the despair is now tempered with hope...
...Something has gone awry in every life, and the very air seems rotten with failed expectations and human sorrow...
...the place is Hollywood...
...Annie's conclusion is that she must go back east...
...As an object upon which others exert their wills, Annie is the classic victim...
...And The Western Coast—bruising in its revelations of distress, exhausting to heroine and reader alike—ends on its least convincing note, with its protagonist in New York, readying herself for that classic American voyage of self-discovery, the trip to Europe...
...Withal, Annie endures, for her drive is simply to keep on living, even as she sweats under the California sun in a heavy tweed suit stolen for her from a studio costume department...
...The finishing touches to the genesis of her maturation are applied by Marvin Eagle, a surgeon who removes her ruptured appendix...
...Hollywood immediately before the War is a disillusioned and disillusioning environment...
...Though she doesn't love Eagle, she is touched by him and learns from him...
...As the War progresses, she reads newspapers for the first time...
...Annie enters this setting a James-ian naif, a stray animal, yet without an animal's singleminded drive for food and self-preservation...
...Rendered with a perception of authentic speech and behavior that is practically unerring, it is an absorbing account of a time, a place and a developing personality...
...Gradually, however, Annie begins to differentiate herself from her surroundings, to become more than a mere tabula rasa for the impressions of others...
...One of these days you'll have to come to some conclusions...
...Since the period is the Depression, disappointments with Communism recur as a leitmotif for persons who are unable to escape their moment in time...
...She barely survives a disastrous marriage to a talentless Communist writer-turned-sailor (a fellow who wants her both innocent and experienced), serious illness, and various impositions by people who project their own needs onto her...
...Abandoned by her father, who has gone off with his most recent wife, she is broke and female and hungry and alone...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
