Heeding the Wrong Calling

...Heeding the Wrong Calling Looking for Work By Susan Cheever Simon and Schuster 188 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Eric Goldstein In this messy, lifeless little novel, Salley Potter joins the hordes of educated, half-liberated heroines stumbling toward fulfillment, Upper East Side-New York style Starting with her ill-considered betrothal in the mid-1960s, Salley narrates the slow breakup of her marriage, several affairs and her constant search for writing jobs Looking for Wotk is an autobiographical novel in the worst possible way the characters are vague, half-realized creatures, lost amid the blandly reconstituted furniture of Ms Cheev-er's own life Details are altered—for example, Salley's rich, famous, WASPy, intellectual father is a Comp-Lit professor instead of a writer—but whether it's fact, fiction or faction matters little when everything is so sketchy Philip Roth, who is a guest at Sal-ley's wedding, along with John Cheever (now who invited htm''), tells the bride, "1 hope you'll call me I have someone who cooks dinner now " Unbelievably, no humor seems intended The real-life celebrities that drop into Ms Cheever's first novel are merely props in a story that languishes in a no man's land between fiction and memoir —lacking the imagination of the former and the required discipline of the latter Salley is neither witty and engaging like Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying, nor irresistibly neurotic like the Diane Keaton character in Manhattan A woman who is calm, vulnerable and yearning is meant to emerge from Looking for WoiCs sketchy vignettes, but the insipid narrative voice she is given makes her often sound stupid and bloodless Salley's descriptive powers are meager parties she takes us to are "chic," the guests at them eccentric " Although the repeated use of "and" plus lots of incomplete sentences aim to convey the texture of Salley's emotions, the result is trite and muddy "1 had cramps the whole trip Maybe from my period and maybe not Doubled up in the front seat of the car, I would swig down Midol with the apple juice we bought at Interstate 80 gas stations and wish I were somewhere else And hope we would never get there " Adrienne Rich wrote "The more 1 live the more I think/Two people together is a miracle " How can we care about a supposedly intelligent heroine whose version of this sentiment, reached after 116 dreary pages, reads "Why is this simple thing that everyone can do—loving each other—why is this simple thing so difficult7...