Pointless Passion
GRAEBER, LAUREL
Pointless Passion Torch Song By Anne Roiphe Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 226 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Laurel Graeber Anne Roiphe's latest novel begins in 1952 in a tavern called the White Horse, where...
...It purifies in its single-minded sense of purpose, temporarily filling voids that will forever after remain empty...
...As for Marjorie, she agrees to be the tool for Jim's autoerotic fantasies—and to cook his food, type his stories, wash his clothes, and perform other mundane services—all in the name of love...
...Eventually, he does manage to write a few novels...
...As in Roiphe's other novels, Up the Sandbox and Long Division, conception is seen here as the one act appropriate for women...
...Surviving on money stolen or" borrowed from Marjorie's family, they have an idyllic relationship...
...Her love is is sterile as his mind...
...Jim's neglected grandmother and weak, well-intentioned father are human and vulnerable figures in a universe of neurotic automatons...
...The young woman who abhorred her family's self-indulgent wealth abandons her ideals, becoming a Gothic heroine ensconced in an Upper East Side luxury apartment of her own...
...In comparison, Marjorie's agonies over Jim read like a schoolgirl's diary...
...This is an ironic solution for Marjorie, who wanted to be wholly unlike her mother...
...In fact, Roiphe demonstrates, the daughter's life differs only in its particulars...
...He brings in rejection slips and Ber-En whores...
...women have been falling in love with mean, mad men in literature (and life) for a very long time...
...Torch Song's theme is not in itself repugnant, nor is it new...
...His preferred perversions would make Larry Flynt blue, but would hardly make a woman pregnant...
...I cannot believe that there is any glory attendant upon a woman's self-destruction, or any catharsis produced by her fortuitous escape...
...Anne Roiphe has squandered her talent for metaphor on a wasteland...
...Moreover, the notion (supported by this book) that men sacrifice themselves for great ideals while women sacrifice themselves for great loves is nothing but a contrived and regressive stereotype...
...Marjorie adds a bizarre twist to this bohemian scenario: She falls in love...
...And there is nothing inspiring about Jim's character, or noble about Marjorie's sacrifice, which takes up the entire book...
...Once Alice is down in the rabbit hole," she says, "there are no sensible questions...
...That may have been a fine device for Lewis Carroll, but it doesn't work here: Readers do ask sensible questions, and Roiphe begs them all...
...The familial episodes in Torch Song are painful, convincing and unpretentious...
...The last feat is perhaps Jim's greatest, since his sexual proclivities are, to put it tactfully, rather unusual...
...Nevertheless, Marjorie hangs on...
...The housewife in Up the Sandbox, aware that she will never have the courage to escape domesticity, dreams Walter Mitty dramas as a temporary refuge from the banal (albeit ultimately beloved) reality of Campbell soup cans...
...Apparently, though, Anne Roiphe does not think passion has to be justified—an egomaniacal, lying, sadistic bigot like Jim deserves to be loved simply because he might one day produce a great work of art...
...Bondage ceases to be interesting, however, when it becomes absurd...
...And Marjorie herself comes alive when she tells of her disappointing relationships with a brother who could not quite love her and a father who never noticed her: "How much I had wanted to hold on to his hand and have him really worry about which camp I went to, to care and notice and stay up at night thinking about whether I should take Latin or French...
...The object of her affection is one Jim Morrison, a gangly, blond student of philosophy and literature...
...Besides her adoration, the single explanation she gives for her self-torture is that "His pretenses, his delusions, his hatreds and his madness made each day a clifl-hanger...
...When Jim wins a fellowship, the two flee to Germany and get married...
...A steady dose of horror flicks would have had the same effect...
...bis other accomplishments are driving Marjorie (and the reader) crazy, and making her a mother...
...Apparently Roiphe believes Sylvia Plath's famous poetic statement was right—every woman does love a fascist...
...In both novels, Roiphe is determined to show that cages are comfortable, that we don't leave the traps we find ourselves in because we entered them for a reason...
...Where other authors' heroines do something—Jong's Isadora has affairs, Ibsen's Nora slams the door?Roiphe's female characters, clinging to their husbands, just get pregnant...
...To characterize the relationship in Torch Song in these terms is to demean real affection and elevate masochistic perversity to a form of worship...
...Marjorie is too vapid for either...
...Jim being what he is, Marjorie's feelings would make more sense if she had loved only philosophy and literature...
...A first love, the author tells us, is never equalled...
...Worst of all, Roiphe seems to believe the romantic nonsense that propels Marjorie's devotion...
...Somehow, they are not completely satisfied with this existence, so they manufacture some additional thrills: Jim uses the infidelities of a local pair as material for his novel, and Marjorie experiences one night of normal heterosexual intercourse with Gerhard, a young Nordic who used to be a member of the Hitler youth...
...Reviewed by Laurel Graeber Anne Roiphe's latest novel begins in 1952 in a tavern called the White Horse, where Marjorie Weiss, a not-quite-Jewish, not-quite-liberated, not-quite-virgin from Park Avenue and Barnard comes to drink Pernod and smoke Gauloises with those who abjure "bourgeois compromise...
...She is at least intelligent enough, though, to comprehend her dilemma and to suffer...
...Upon their return to the States, Jim wins literary fame, and Mar-jorie, discovering that he is no longer dependent on her, decides she wants a baby: It won't save her marriage, but it might save her self-esteem...
...Madness can convey greatness, but there is little that is great about Marjorie and Jim...
...she brings in the wash...
...Although she feels repulsed by Nazis (despite being married to one), she admits they can be attractive: "The Nazis had been defeated, but their image of beauty had survived the burning bunkers and affected us, male and female alike...
...The passages where the author does convey anguish occur in the portraits of Marjorie's and Jim's families...
...Meanwhile, her husband, who despised everything bourgeois, buys himself diamonds and a velvet smoking jacket with his royalty checks...
...But if Torch Song is often satirical, as Up the Sandbox was, it lacks the earlier book's humor and poig-nance...
Vol. 60 • July 1977 • No. 15
