The Overblown and the Overlooked
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE OVERBLOWN AND THE OVERLOOKED by pearl k. bell The most irritating literary event of 1974 occurred this summer with the publication of Alison Lurie's fifth novel in a dozen...
...Fast asleep...
...Miss Lurie at her best is a lesser Mary McCarthy -much lesser because her scorn is consistently blunted by the cliche lineaments and responses of her cartoon people...
...Her first work, Harriet Said, was published in the U.S...
...last year and sank without a trace...
...and the best demolition job remains one that was written two decades ago, Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution...
...Nellie, a woman of ramrod determination and sobriety, fusses over her dead mother's furniture like an obsessive nursemaid...
...Though Miss Lurie has tried to update the genre with hippies and peace marches and Women's Lib, not to mention an elaborate but unsuccessful metaphor linking domestic strife with the Vietnam War, all these devices sit leadenly on her trite novel like an undigested meal...
...Since the '50s, the groves of academe have been pruned, stripped of their bark, hacked at, spat upon, and chopped down by dozens of novelists-who-teach...
...Unfortunately, almost all the wit and wisdom in The War Between the Tates has the facile glibness and smug complacency of this machine-tooled profundity about the ages of man...
...I hasten to add, however, that the tin-ear publisher has struck again: In England the book was called The Dressmaker, a title that should impress the dimmest reader as unalterably right...
...her icy distaste is entirely out of proportion to their dull insignificance...
...they will forget that they are ugly, foolish, guilty, and dying...
...Feeling is the enemy, the meticulously aimed jab the means for keeping emotion at bay...
...Inevitably, since "serious" fiction will not tolerate a happy ending, Brian and Erica come together again in a sad reconciliation of necessities, "and forget for a few moments that they were once exceptionally handsome, intelligent, righteous, and successful young people...
...Ira is a crass, hard, illiterate scoundrel who breaks Rita's heart and stirs a fire of vengeful hatred in Nellie that leads to disaster...
...Her formerly adorable and compliant children have, while her back was turned, become "nasty, brutish and tall," a brace of hostile monsters defiling the household air with their insolent, filthy, foulmouthed teen-agedness...
...When Rita brings the American to tea with her aunts, Margo knows instantly what sort of man he is, and Miss Bainbridge defines the menace of his heartless, animal greed by means of a bleak spareness that only a superbly gifted writer can manipulate with such awesome resonance...
...The majority of reviewers have taken to the hallelujah trail with equally incontinent fervor...
...But the plot of this domestic tragedy is less important than Miss Bainbridge's precision, the quiet perfection with which she renders the quality of life in this suppressed, anguished household, and her wit, which has Nellie sitting down to her Singer "like the great organ at the Palladium cinema before the war...
...Her husband, Brian, unfairly afflicted, in his pompously self-pitying view, with short stature and unfulfilled promise, is an also-ran academic who has never managed to finish the Great Book or become the adviser to statesmen that his youthful brilliance foreshadowed...
...Trouble comes in the form of an American GI, stationed at a nearby camp, with whom foolish, romantic Rita falls in love...
...Despite her attempts to be as sharp and mercilessly satiric as she was in her earlier, far superior efforts-the Nowhere City, with its scathing portrait of Los Angeles, and Imaginary Friends, with its unrelenting mockery of sociologists and quack psychics-miss Lurie has in fact produced her weakest, most tedious work to date...
...Alas, both "the novel" and wise women of America would seem to have fallen on bad times, if this hoopla is taken at face value...
...The time of The Secret Glass is World War II...
...Out to lunch...
...Miss Bainbridge is British and in her late 30s...
...Truman Capote ranks her with Jane Austen...
...For this reason her new book, though stuffed with the sardonic observation that is Miss Lurie's trademark, seems finally without a point of view...
...To begin with, where were all those smart and worldly editors when that sophomoric title hobbled into view...
...Judgment is there-it must be there-yet it is tempered at every point by Miss Bainbridge's knowledge and humor, her affection and pity, her unique and wholly arresting talent...
...In a working-class district of dank and murky Liverpool two unmarried middle-aged women, the dressmaker Nellie and her younger sister, Margo, have been rearing their niece, Rita, in oppressively genteel poverty...
...Even this repellent but fascinating cruelty is absent from The War Between the Tates, for the objects of its homicidal dissection were dead at the start...
...For when one gets past the klieglight superlatives and proceeds to wade through the book itself, one discovers a handful of chestnuts that have seen better days in better hands...
...On the evidence of The Secret Glass, she is an author of extraordinary power whose touch is at once steel-hard and delicate...
...She has written four novels, yet is, as Karl Miller observed in a recent essay in the New York Review, "possibly the least known of the contemporary English novelists who are worth knowing...
...Perhaps because she writes of mean people in drab places, perhaps because her plot devices are at times so deceptively sensational that her fiction is confused with crime stories-whatever the reason, Beryl Bainbridge has been scandalously neglected...
...The characters are predictable in their mediocrity and unimportant in their fatuousness...
...Nothing will suit this high-minded wife and mother but that Brian divorce her and marry his "like wow" mistress...
...Miss Lurie's loyal friends and followers have woven an extravagant garland of praise that festoons the dust jacket, and they are truly a redoubtable claque...
...As we follow Nellie and Margo and Rita and Ira to their catastrophic climax, our involvement in their experience-through the novelist's brilliant shaping-becomes an act of uncluttered concentration and total assent...
...Writers & Writing THE OVERBLOWN AND THE OVERLOOKED by pearl k. bell The most irritating literary event of 1974 occurred this summer with the publication of Alison Lurie's fifth novel in a dozen years, her longest and ostensibly grandest work of fiction, The War Between the Tates (Random House, 372 pp., $6.95...
...Randall Jarrell wrote of the McCarthy-like lady novelist in his book that she did not murder to dissect, she dissected to murder...
...James Merrill, recklessly forsaking poetry for hyperbole, calls her "the wisest woman in America...
...Gore Vidal, hardly a soft touch for fellow-novelists, rolls out the glittering encomiums for this "marvelous and witty novel by the Queen Herod of modern fiction...
...Erica Tate, the 40-year-old wife of a political science professor at Corinth University (the 48-year-old Miss Lurie and her husband teach at Cornell) is alarmed to find herself moving through the dailiness of her life in a deepening fog of depression and discontent...
...The war breaks out when Erica learns that Brian, like countless university-novel professors before him, has been having an affair with a worshipful graduate student, and Erica's depression is miraculously dissolved in a strong brew of moral purpose when she finds out the girl is pregnant...
...Indeed, she is a more remarkable, far more original writer than Lessing or Murdoch or Spark...
...Out of sorts...
...It is Beryl Bainbridge's The Secret Glass (Brazil-ler, 152 pp., $5.95), not Alison Lurie's popgunning at triviality, that can be singled out as "very nearly all that the novel was meant to be...
...Out of pencils...
...Her sister Margo, once briefly married, is flighty, sexy, easily distracted and dishevelled, a soft and disorderly contrast to Nellie's stern, hard-working responsibility and spinsterly propriety...
...Universities may have changed considerably over the years, yet the would-be satirists continue to treat them in the same derivative, witless way...
...In part this is because of her subject-the human comedy enacted in an American university...
...Whenever someone—usually a woman-Appears in danger of engaging the reader's sympathy, Miss Lurie retreats into a diffuse, unfocused derision that vitiates judgment altogether...
...On the front page of the New York Times Book Review, for example, Sara Sanborn, distressed by the insufficiency of placing Miss Lurie's book beside Vanity Fair and The Egoist, climbs incautiously to dizzier heights by concluding that The War Between the Tales is "very nearly all that the novel was meant to be...
...So intense, pure and unsentimental is the feeling Miss Bainbridge draws from these lives of proud desperation, of pleasureless obedience to unquestioned imperatives of convention, that a great stillness comes over the reader...
Vol. 57 • September 1974 • No. 17
