Searching for Mom

...Obsessively drinking, Jean would rave and wallow in nearly repulsive, if instructive, self-pity: "Startling me, she suddenly stuck out her thin neck and shouted, 'Oh what a Goddamn shitty business we've taken on, being writers...

...There are some funny moments too...

...I don't now...

...Germaine, we are informed, complains that "No one ever does the simplest things I ask for, but everyone asks me for the world, the moon, the stars, the whole universe, and my money...

...We must think the matter through some more—along with Plante...

...In view of the "mother-son" theme, and since Plante has already let us know he is gay, this should not come as a surprise...

...her own room at the school is white—neutral...

...And what have I done...

...In this respect two themes stand out: isolation, both real and perceived, and anger...

...Neither do we understand why Plante believes Germaine's "secret knowledge" of the world could make him a "different person," or what "different" may mean...

...Sitting in Germaine's living room-kitchen on his first visit to her home...

...Your mother?' she snapped...

...We care because by the end of the book we feel like his friend...

...What shit...

...I never much did, much...

...Nor are we sure why he feels "guilt towards, not all women, but difficult women," or why he thinks they are difficult on account of him...

...the third with their common acquaintance, Germaine Greer...

...The very colors in Plante's portrayal of Germaine in Italy seem Italian—white (all her garden flowers), green, and especially red...

...Germaine said to me, 'You like difficult women, don't you?' "I said in a Tulsan accent, 'I guess I do.' "'Well then,' she said, I'll introduce you to my mother...

...David Plante's great achievement is to coax his readers from skepticism to intellectual curiosity and finally to affection, both for the ladies he describes and for himself...

...What do I have for my darlings to eat?' She reached inside...

...he experiences "a moment of intense self-consciousness so great I was not sure who I was...

...Similarly, Sonia "was able to produce in her parties an intimate sense of family reunion...

...Jean, on the other hand, is always presented indoors in scenes where the colors portend good or bad...

...The difficulty is suggested as well by Sonia's remark that Jean mistrusted the author to tell the truth about her, and by Germaine's comment that all her friends have got her wrong...

...With Germaine Plante seems to arrive home ("I felt I had come into a center of privileged pleasure"), although in a sense that finally eludes us...

...Don't be deceived...

...The first part of Difficult Women deals with Jean Rhys, who was old and disabled when the author met her...

...Plante's quest, however, seems to be for the mother...

...in public she incessantly discourses on women's sexuality and her own, on contraception, abortion, etc...

...Plante watches as she sets about feeding her cats: "Germaine opened the fridge door and looking in said, 'What do I have for my darlings...

...The sequence initially leaves an indifferent impression that Plante's sole aim is to document how he entered the literary life...

...Reviewed by Katherine Olstein Contributor, "Change" Since everything possible seems to have been said by now on the subject of women, the title of this book makes it sound redundant...

...Here's testicle.'" She cut it up...

...The access exacts its price...

...Through her, Plante learns that friends do not simply confide in each other...

...Still, when we hear Germaine observe that most of sex is in the mind, we sense this event means something special to Plante...

...If we are about to conclude that, after all, Plante's goal is to encapsulate three different types of female life, the overlapping interests reflected in the compendium of topics arranged alphabetically at the end of the book makes clear the impossibility of doing that...

...The youngest difficult woman's personality is entirely public, though...

...Jean frets, "I don't matter...

...The dramatic climax is built around a motel door, painted shut, between their rooms on a Thanksgiving trip...

...When Germaine succeeds in having it opened, Plante reports, "A thrill of fear passed through me...

...Jean, for example, proposes that they pretend he is her son (the real one, she remarks in passing, died as an infant...

...Oh what shit...

...In private she rarely talks about herself...

...I don't want to hear about your mol her.'" Sonia could make him feel as isolated and as despondent as herself...

...But when he starts to recall his own mother to Jean "The corner of her upper lip rose and her face took on the hardness of an old whore...

...In Tulsa she paints the Women's Literature Center "Liberty Red...

...He recalls that Jean's reminiscences "opened the door to the closed center of her life, a cafe in Paris in the '20s-It was the cafe I had, since my adolescence, fantasized about sitting in...

...But this explanation breaks down when we see Sonia, who was not a writer, picking on him at one of her literary parties: "Sonia glared at me and said, 'That's silly...

...the second with Sonia Orwell, the widow of George, Jean's friend, and a patron of the arts in London and Paris...

...Nothing...

...Her characteristic color is blue, the color of her eyes...

...What do you know about writing?'" We wonder why Plante put up with such awful behavior and why he wants to record it...

...For his book turns out to be a kind of odyssey, complete with the powerful, frightening women traditional in that genre, with the narrator in the role of Odysseus or, better, his young son Telemachus...

...The cats had their noses into the bottom of the fridge...

...Look at me...

...Then they both say goodnight...

...After two weeks at the University of Oklahoma, for instance, Germaine "was speaking with a Tulsan accent...

...Plante observes that "Sonia was naturally ill-tempered, as if just having to live, day after day, were reason enough...

...Yet Plante wants women, not himself, to be the focus...

...It is fascinating, expertly written and, in the end, unfathomable...

...your interest in her is literary," we nearly agree...

...And she knows the Italian dialects around her house in Italy as if she were a native...

...they also experience life's minutiae together, something we see as well with Germaine...

...He adds: "I was in love with the unhap-piness in her, and yet reassured that, no matter what I did, what I felt it my duty to do, to lessen that unhappiness, I couldn't: Sonia wouldn't allow me to...

...Exactly what we aren't sure...

...Sonia says, "I lose control when I'm with people I don't know...

...Germaine's aggressive expertise, her insistence on doing everything right and conviction that no one else can, seem to be her way of imposing her control...

...Nothing.'" When Plante tells himself, "It is because she is a writer that you see her, sit with her, listen to her...

...Perhaps, we hypothesize, he wishes to bear sympathetic witness to these women's complex, troubled lives for our edification, and to memorialize Jean and Sonia and Germaine as individuals (even the outgoing Germaine seems unable to do this for herself) in return for their friendship...

...Oh darlings,' she said, 'you're so lucky...

...Sonia "helped her friends in need as if she, herself, had no need of help...

...She "was opening the doors of the houses like book covers, introducing me into literary London...