Tale of a Woman Writer

...For the most part, though, she flourishes her pen like an overheated Edna O'Brien: "Eliza did not cry, although that was certainly what a part of her would have liked to do...

...But what is most disturbing about Listening to Billie is the distance between its intentions and its performance...

...The bluesy music of Billie Holiday—the "Billie" of the title, of course—alluded to many times throughout, serves merely to point up the barrenness of all this fictional anguish, and is a glaring symbol of "the grief and guilt and rage" the author cannot render by her own art...

...Eliza has turned 40 and is a full-fledged poet: "She saw, or suddenly felt, an urgency of words, a kaleidoscope that stopped to form a pattern...

...he glides, glides—he is astounding, the nerve and balance and grace...

...1 can't live without you...

...The protagonist, Eliza Hamilton Quarles, does develop in the course of the novel into a poet sufficiently esteemed to be offered an improbable $500 for a single poem, as well as into a woman who can hold down two lovers and serve gourmet snacks in her sparkling home...

...But Alice Adams has written a story not so much about the artistic life as the Beautiful Life—the kind succinctly epitomized in a recent movie advertisement: "What you dream about, they do...

...Then there are those that enter with a grand air, that visibly "aspire...

...Daria is very unhappy and has to be sedated so that she will continue to sit quietly at the dinner table...

...she sensed that somewhere within her there was a woman weeping, or perhaps it was a terrified child, its heart already broken...

...She shuddered, thinking about it: what all did they have to doV Eliza and Miriam's supervisor is the embittered 26-year-old Kathleen (this is a melting-pot assortment of secretaries), angrily in love with a guitarist, despite her credo: "I don't dig a lot of emotional mess...

...Indeed to accept Listening to Billie on its own inflated terms, as John Leonard and others have done, is to condescend to women and to minimize the areas of competence outside of the kitchen that they are trying to master...

...Things are still popping: Daria has been missing for two days...

...Surely, women do not appraise vocations the way they do dress-sizes...

...Alice Adams, as her earlier Families and Survivors indicated, can write —almost loo well...

...Mary McCarthy, when asked in a Paris Review interview whether she believed in such categories, replied: "I mean, there's certain kind of woman writer who's a capital W, capital W...

...Evan kills himself, and Eliza moves with their small daughter to a cottage in San Francisco...

...She is spendthrift with words...

...The language skids between a Peyton Place-like level of idiocy-Reed, I came to tell you...

...One of these is an 18-year-old black girl, Miriam, who says things like "he call" and "you right, I reckon I should...

...Eliza and Evan's marriage proves tragically unhappy...

...Catherine, Eliza's daughter, has blossomed into an ungainly flower-child and gives birth to Dylan, the first in a series of homeless offspring...

...descriptions of "pink-tomackerel" sunsets litter the pages, and there are many resourceful if dispensable evocations of nature: "As suddenly as the clap of thunder sounded, they were deluged with rain: huge drops, bucketfuls thrown from the sky, beating down palm fronds, bending heavy hibiscus leaves, crumpling the big flowers to the wilted shapes of bright wet scarves, hanging limp...

...There are those that arc content to be minor, achieved "cn-leriainnienis," to borrow Graham Greene's description...

...The years pass...

...It is as though once having grasped the nature of the conflicts, all Adams is willing to grant them is a dismissive pat on the head...

...It opens in the '50s, at a nightclub, where blond and pretty Eliza Hamilton is sitting with Evan Quarles, her husband-to-be, "the paler blond and sad, Deep Southern man," waiting to hear Billie Holiday sing...

...But stronger, somehow enlarged...

...Eliza is now a part-time secretary in a medical office where she befriends her coworkers...

...I am too small and round to be a poet...

...If such hooks fail, they do so quietly, whisked off almost before they have sidled on stage...

...1 'm absolutely in love with you...

...Eliza gets to island-hop thanks to another of her lovers, Harry Argent, a movie director who encourages her single-minded creative drive: "What Eliza really wanted to be doing was any one of three other things: waxing a newly stripped walnut coffee table, walking in the marvelous light outside or working on a poem...

...And it is an embarrassing, noisy failure because it insistently imagines itself as engaging a major theme: a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young woman...

...The tale is supposed to cover a 30-year span, yet there is little appreciable difference in atmosphere or character from one decade to the next, except for a few sneaky and inauthen-tic references (Nixon, Watergate, Anne Sexton's suicide...

...and a well-articulated level of awareness?Eliza had seen their friendship as marked with dark areas of reticence, like craters, or whatever they are, on the moon...

...Smith, mellowed by the disclosures of Watergate and the gradual dwindling of his fortune, confesses to Eliza: "Christ, if only I could have married someone like you...

...This, plus the few telling social observations?Peggy laughed—her style included a lot of warm, small and inexplicable laughter...

...you see, she wants to give all of Smith's money away to poor, ragged women she spots on their travels...

...You notice the change in Elizabeth Bowen...

...How "feminine" and inane...

...The book ends with one of those familial gatherings at Josephine's hideaway...

...while teaching in a New England school, he falls in love with "the most beautiful boy in the world...

...Meanwhile, Eliza's beautiful half-sister, Daria, marries a man with two last names, Smith Worthington, who eventually makes enormous sums of money and powerful connections in Washington...

...they'd had an interior decorator and had white carpets and white velvet sofas and gold lamps, and they wore all these different kinds of fur coats, and white shoes...

...He is Eliza's and then Daria's lover, and then —what else can you do when you hit 40 and your teeth begin hurting?jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge...

...he glides along the undercurl of those glistening steep and wickedly breaking waves...

...All the material of junk novels is here—money, sex, madness—along with a dash of classy writing and a sprinkle or two of genuine insight...

...I think they become interested in decor...

...Billie, for all its attempted realism of detail, is laughably Gothic in its intertwining liaisons and coincidence-riddled design...

...she thought about these girls she knew who were whores, who lived in a big apartment on Twin Peaks...

...Ted as a sexual person would be convincing only to a virgin"—would seem to indicate that Adams' gift is small but true, if only she would stick to it...

...Reviewed by Daphne Merkin Contributor, "Commentary, " "New Republic" A curious and often overlooked aspect of novels is their own sense of themselves—their literary self-image, so to speak...

...Harry is planning a celebratory trip to Mexico for the two of them...

...Moreover, as a depiction of what it means to be a woman and an artist, the book is dishonest, essentially corroborating the traditional male view of women trying to escape the constrictions of domesticity...

...He becomes a superstar after abandoning Kathleen for Miriam...

...There is also Josephine, Eliza and Daria's mother, thrice-married and a successful writer herself...

...It is full of terrible incidents that leave strangely little imprint...

...This being the sort of novel where idle fancies are scrupulously attended to under the guise of purposeful actions, Daria, childless herself, unofficially adopts Dylan and flies off to Kauai with the accomodating Smith expressly to observe Dylan's reputed father?a wide-shouldered, darkly tanned black haired young god"—at his surfing...

...Alice Adams is a Woman Writer, and Listening to Billie is an interior-decorator's delight, stuffed, like Eliza's house, "with books and records and magazines . . . with music and flowers and good smells of food" —a creation, in short, abounding in surfaces, not substance...

...She maintains a house in Maine where the clan gathers periodically to count the corpses and toast the changing scenery...

...Is it treasonous to suggest at this late, embattled date that this book can be considered most kindly as a better than average woman's novel...

...She has, moreover, managed to grow up in a ghetto neighborhood sweetly unenlightened about the cruder facts of life...

...Consider Reed Ashford, "a small man, perfectly made...

...a poet, a woman poet, should be tall and thin, like her mother...

...skeletons stagger out of closets and comfortably settle themselves in as featured players...

...Listening to Billie, although physically slight, is an example...

...For one thing, she felt that she was not the righl shape for a poet...

...But that's not all: He turns out to have been "the most beautiful boy in the world" who walked into Evan Quarles' Cicero class...

...Words, her own work...

...Her later work has more drapery in it...

...This is a fatal liability in a book that depends so much upon convoluted interpersonal dramas...