A Portrait of Two Sisters

...It is not for want of enterprise that Byatt has tripped here...

...Hers does not culminate in marriage, but in what seems to be a fully compensatory degree of professional success: After toying with and then dropping a thesis on Milton, she takes a job at Vogue...

...Although throughout there are passages that effectively combine an informed literary appreciation with acute social observation, I think Still Life is ultimately a failed novel...

...Stephanie's story, by contrast, ends abruptly with her death, caused by a freak domestic accident...

...Stephanie's accommodation to the life she has chosen is not without pain and private regret...

...It is digressive and for long stretches overly intellectu-alized...

...The men Frederica meets outside of fashionable novels—an asexual don, a somewhat self-absorbed playwright, an attractive but impossibly arrogant businessman—are not much more satisfying...

...Forster...

...In her own home she almost singlehand-edly transforms what threatens to be a spectacularly uncomfortable family Christmas dinner into pretty much the festive, civilized occasion it is meant to be...

...Present at the little feast is 17 -year-old Frederica Potter...

...The sun-drenched landscapes that Van Gogh loved take on a vital newness as seen through her unaccustomed eyes...

...Consider the lunch some of her characters enjoy in Provence: "little cold herb omelettes, raw smoked ham, huge pumpkin-indented scarlet tomatoes, black olives with garlic and pepper, glistening, wrinkled and hot...

...Something is missing in both women...

...More serious, neither Frederica nor Stephanie ever achieve the stature of characters we care enough about to follow through the many plot turns devised for them...

...Stephanie, for all her admirable qualities— her womanliness, her making do—finally appeals to us more as one victimized by her circumstances than as one who surmounts them...

...Yet she is not a person of great inner worth...

...Her whole project of understanding the English 1950s from the very different perspective of the present is impressively ambitious...

...And while at first we are charmed by her increasing ability to categorize, eventually this seems trivializing, like the list of "Hurrahs" and "Boos" she devises for Vogue...

...and the mother verges on a feminist cliche of the housewife eaten up with barely suppressed rage...

...She has escaped the drab confines of her family's home in the North of England by getting a summer job as an aupaire girl for a French family...

...Exact, sensuous, painterly, this description also cleverly manages to capture the avid English appreciation for Mediterranean plenty and freshness in the years after World War II, the period in which most of the book is set...

...Indeed, the progress of Frederica's education affords Byatt many opportunities to exercise her assured, cutting wit on a number of British intellectual icons and enthusiasms, including F.R...

...Hurrahs" include Iris Murdoch, Waiting for Godot, colored shoes...

...Stephanie's sensibility, Byatt is careful to indicate, is surely as cultivated as her younger sister's, albeit not in the direction of self-aggrandizement...

...The second half of the work follows the very different trajectory of her older sister Stephanie, who gives up a university career in order to marry Daniel Orton, a gruff Anglican priest...

...In time she becomes a radio critic on the British Broadcasting Corporation's prestigious Third Programme...

...Her amused observation of the young men at the last affair, their "mixture of public school good manners and a kind of prompting greed for reminiscence,'' is a revealing example of the author's own ironic placing...

...Together they share a cramped existence among his lumpish Yorkshire parishioners...

...In tone and mood the narrativeof hcrshort married life—punctuated by two extraordinary scenes of childbirth told from the mother's viewpoint—is to some extent overshadowed by its sudden close...

...Her "thinking words," as she calls them, words like "discourse," "discourse of reason," "sophistical," "anguish," "peripeteia," have had to be dropped for lack of any possible response in her provincial world .She says to herself, however, adapting from Shakespeare, "Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love, and still less for constriction of vocabulary...

...Frederica's tale traces the growth of her knowledge—or, more accurately, her knowingness: She becomes adept at classifying and manipulating people and ideas as she dives into Cambridge's busy, elite social life—May balls, amateur theatricals, dates with a viscount, tea with E.M...

...Another masculine style, no less dubious than Jim Dixon's, is drawn from the irresponsible innocence of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn ~Waugh'sBridesheadRevisited...

...In fact, it proves harmonious enough to reconcile—for a moment, anyway— her resolutely atheist father to her husband's vocation...

...a sharp, fresh goat cheese and rose-orange Cavaillonmelons...

...a lot of red wine, Cotes du Ven-toux, and a lot of good crusty bread...

...Leavis and his "Scrutiny Utopia," and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim...

...Boos" include headlines about Suez, pleated skirts, theU and non-U debate...

...She sees straight through her husband's petty bourgeois parishioners, with their worship of material things and their social anxieties, and knows she is made of finer stuff...

...Nevertheless, she performs creditably and cheerfully the small duties that fall to her, visiting hospital wards for sick children or designing the costumes for a nativity pageant...

...She is especially funny and pointed, if also a little unfair, when presenting the hero of Amis' comic novel as one of several "assertions of British masculinity" Frederica is made to contend with...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Dissent," New York "Times Book Review" The talented English writer Antonia Byatt gives us much that is pleasing in her fourth novel...

...Frederica is an ambitious young woman, and her fortunate rise through the tightly guarded, almost exclusively male worlds of Cambridge and literary London in the '50s occupies roughly half of Still Life...

...A few flashes of Byatt's characteristic wit remain—notably her portrayal of Gideon Farrar, a sanctimonious rector whose amativeness puts him in a direct line of descent from George Eliot's worldlier clerics...

...Some of the characters are hardly credible—the breakdown and complete recovery of a Potter brother, Marcus, who experiences an elaborate spiritual odyssey, seems forced...

...For all her rebelliousness, Frederica, at least at the outset, is sufficiently of her time to believe "unquestioningly that marriage was the end of every good story...

...The rather dazzling ironic cut and thrust in Frederica's section of the novel, though, is in Stephanie's set aside for a more contemplative approach as the author makes greater allowance for the supreme human facts of birth and death...

...But in the course of attempting to fulfill these ambitions, of bringing to bear on her subjects the play of mind and allusion at her disposal, Byatt has somehow lost sight of a critical factor: It has always been one of the more important objectives of the novel to create for the reader whole and satisfying models of humanity...

...Frederica is a kind of Becky Sharp figure who does now and then delight with her audacity, the way she overcomes her doubts and mortifications and forg-esaheadintheworld...

...She has no illusions about the spiritual emptiness of her existence, or its impoverishing effects even on her vocabulary...

...So is the introduction into her fiction of such matters as Van Gogh's esthetics of the still life, whether in the elegantly turned discussions between her characters or in her considered authorial judgments...