Getting Smart

...When they work, as they do about half the time, they reveal more or less artfully a lot about the way we are (and why...

...it is funny and astute, if needlessly overblown, and occasionally it speaks, simply, of the pain behind the conventional absurdities: "Tell him how sorry we are...

...I'm flying...

...Stuck in her dingy childhood home with the penny-pinching Willy and Baby Mary, someone else's child, Praxis eventually gets smart and follows the advice of a college friend: "'The only way out,' Irma had said, 'is to sleep your way out.'" Praxis thus takes up a "Belle de Jour" existence, whoring during the day at the Raffles Esplanade Drive, "a lunchtime drinking club down on the seafront," and seeing to Willy's meals and Baby Mary's diapers in the evening...

...The other three all suffer from trying to be generic rather than specific, as though Sontag thought it were possible to construct fiction out of leftovers from Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will...

...Ben leaves Lucy for Ruth, "the dark little waitress at the golf club," whose "lowly social status was sufficient to keep Ben free from sexual anxiety and mental torment...

...I, Etcetera is dazzling when it sticks to the "1" part of the title...

...so that she can devote herself exclusively to keeping house for him in Brighton...

...Debriefing" is Sontag at her most humane, but also Sontag the purveyor of trendy solace: "Let's lie down together, love, and hold each other...

...It reduces the body's natural defences against disease...

...and more than a little vainglo-riously: "I remember...

...and short on evoking the emotional drama that presumably accounts for all this wordy anguish...

...True, she displays a lunatic streak, but "it at least enabled her, in whatever form it happened to take—rats or stars or anti-static—to function as a man might do, to earn the respect of her peers and get to the opera of an evening...

...Don't stop me...

...He "impales" her night and day, eats her dinners of sausages and mash, and finally does her out of her education ("Where will a degree get you...

...Their shared last name notwithstanding, Lucy and Benjamin have never legally married and are in any case unfamiliar with the concept of marital bliss: "Ben despised her for the shiksa girl she was, lacking morality, sensitivity, history, and that profundity which constant fear can create in the individual...

...My churlish silences...

...Don't stop me...

...To some kind of secretarial job...

...Baby" is a mocking close-up of the generation gap in extremis...

...w T T ith what quickened gratitude, then, one reads Fay Weldon's Praxis (Summit, 251 pp., $9.95...

...Much, much more is yet to come: Praxis moves to London, becomes a receptionist at the BBC, dyes her hair blond under the tutelage of that same shrewd Irma, meets and marries Ivor, the product manager of a soup-mix firm, "a good, kind, clever—if obtuse—man...

...Hypatia goes on to Oxford and a hugely successful career in the civil service...

...I thought I was convincing...

...I'm prowling...

...Whereas Hypatia skirts the realm of "domestic relationships" entirely, Praxis gets embroiled in an endless series of them...

...Weldon's novel is brilliant, but it is rarely ingenious, about pain or anything else...

...She agreed...

...The jarring fragments are nevertheless redolent, and they evoke oddly comprehensive images: "For meanwhile, while I was waiting, upon their China, the China of pigtails and Chiang-Kai-shek and more people than can be counted, had been grafted the China of optimism, the bright future, more people than can be counted, blue cloth jackets and peaked caps...

...Her heroine has been exposed or exposes herself to the worst elements—"1, little Praxis Duveen, bastard, adulteress, whore, committer of incest, murderess, what else...

...The halfheartedly invoked "trip to see beautiful things," similarly, provides her with the opportunity to expound rather largely—"Well, there's always something ineffable about the past, don't you think...

...Hot tears...

...By the novel's end Praxis has stumbled upon the Women's Movement and therein upon some piteous truths: "T seem to have difficulty,' said Praxis, out of nothing, into nowhere, 'in actually loving a man, in any permanent sense.'" In a final, somewhat strained climax she lands in jail for murder and becomes a feminist cause celebre...

...Obscenity," is contemptuous and contemptible...

...We do the best we can with what we have.'" Fay Weldon has written a contemporary Moll Flanders with enormous skill and humor...

...and the manner in which she weathers them is by turns desperately sad and terribly funny...

...They live on an "executive estate" and Praxis has two children who hardly fill her to bursting with maternal pride: "It was not that the children depressed her, so much as that they drained her of animation...

...I find it long on phrase-making ("At the mercy of your mood...

...This small marvel, an "archaeology of longings," is littered with private references ("David wears my father's ring"), and yet manages to trace a map of lost hopes and abiding wishes ("Why not want to be good...

...Whatever it may sound like from this summary, Praxis is not a covert manifesto, the latest biased report from the sexual battlefield...

...Praxis and her scowling older sister, Hypatia, are the daughters of fragile Lucy Duveen and the drunken, philandering "Dirty Jew," Benjamin Duveen...

...As a result much of her fiction is arid, not so much because she lacks a heart but because it is always at the service of her brain: "With respect to pain, I have been ingenious...

...From its opening sentences this astonishing novel catches the felt—not merely the observed—quality of the lives it depicts: "Praxis Duveen, at the age of five, sitting on the beach at Brighton, made a pretty picture for the photographer...

...when they don't they are boring gimmicks, futile exercises mired in condescension...

...Writers &Writing GETTING SMART by daphne merkin T he eight stories in Susan Sontag's /, Etcetera (Farrar Straus Giroux, 246 pp., $8.95) are all tricky, in the sense of being stunts—highwire acts of intellect—rather than tales, breathless recreations of "once upon a time...

...My undaunted caresses...

...Two days later she left her apartment again and killed herself, showing me that she didn't mind doing something stupid...

...There is a rueful irony at large here—"After she came back for good in 1939, M. used to say, 'In China, children don't talk.' But her telling me that, in China, burping at the table is a polite way of showing appreciation for the meal didn't mean I could burp"—that subtly undercuts Sontag's impassioned, easily triggered rhetoric: "Moralism is the legacy of the past, moralism rules the domain of the future...

...Delirum...

...Epiphany...

...She has gotten this glib-ness, perhaps, from listening to too much rock music and reading too many jazzy magazines ("Look at all this stuff I've got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms...

...Among the first is Willy, the grimy university student ("I don't believe in washing...

...Too ingenious, by half...

...She appeals to the Reverend Allbright to help Lucy in blotting out the stain of Jewish ancestry (the time is the '20s), and her daughters, rechristened Hilda and Patricia, are sent to proper Church of England schools...

...Tell him our childhoods weren't any better than his----Tell him when he was born we started to die----Tell him that we love him____" The remaining four stories hinge on abstractions and sound vaguely alike...

...The rosy picture is to shade rapidly into darker tones...

...It is an original, even an eccentric book about survival: "'Yes,' said Praxis, 'it is perfectly possible that my life to date is indicative of a damaged personality: but most of us are emotionally damaged in some degree or another...

...Round angel face, yellow curls, puffed sleeves, white socks and little white shoes—one on, one off, while she tried to take a pebble from between her tiny pink toes—delightful...

...I stroke my delirium like the balls of the comely waiter...

...He could love her, and make love to her, all at the same time...

...The worst, "American Spirits," a lengthy embarrassment featuring a "Miss Flatface" and "Mr...

...After his departure, Lucy slowly cracks...

...And although the form of this "story" is unorthodox, it is not, like some of the others, emptily so...

...The best piece in the collection is "Project for a Trip to China...

...Her sister is less lucky...

...In time she abandons the lace-curtained wife-swapping of the bougeoisie for Phillip, Irma's filmmaker husband, who is attractively childlike after the stoutly responsible Ivor...

...Unguided Tour," containing high moments and some pithy lines, has been especially singled out for praise...

...Sontag writes about her own life with a complex, droll imagination that she is unfortunately reluctant or unable to apply to the lives of all us "etceteras...

...Tell him we're victims, too...

...Praxis gets good marks, too, but fails to develop Hypatia's "cool shell," a "partly acquired, partly native indifference," and is in a stale of mute horror and bereavement: "Was there not a time .. some other world, some other place, when she had been happy...

...Still, the chicness of her outlook does not, in this instance, detract from the genuine pathos of the story about her friend, the "poor moneyed waif," Julia: "That late Wednesday afternoon I told Julia how stupid it would be if she committed suicide...

...Sontag is writing about traveling with a difficult lover, yet the lover exists too conveniently as a vehicle for Thoughts of the Author on Love...

...A change of heart") upon which it is possible to locate crucial aspects of one's own life as well as of Sontag's...

...Hypatia, a brilliant student, imperturbably detaches herself from the emotional debris that surrounds her at home...