Pondering a Family Mystery
CAVELL, MARCIA
Pondering a Family Mystery The Bobby-Soxer By Hortense Calisher Doubleday. 281 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Marcia Cavell The themes of Hortense Calisher's latest novel will be familiar to readers...
...the present as a tale whose telling thus requires the future...
...She retreats to her room'' to forge the character such a creature might best have...
...but the writing lacks that sure sense of key that allows one to keep the beginning in mind, to sense where one is going, yet be surprised...
...The family moves, and Leo sees a doctor in Boston...
...So will the narrator: because she is to "be" Leo in a play about the town written by the title character's husband (and her own mother's lover...
...Ittakes two readings, however, to see that the novel earns these lovely lines...
...because she herself comes to see Leo's puzzle—"Am I male or female...
...All these demand a reader's patient collaboration...
...Perhaps," the narrator reflects, "it was a stonecutter's mistake...
...We are often in the dark about things we haven't been moved to see...
...The title character is peripheral...
...Calisher makes her themes explicit in the closing paragraph, where they achieve a kind of mystical transfiguration: "Across the way, the porch that once was ours is dark, though the birds return...
...The seventh week she emerges to say she must leave the farm...
...One character or action fragment follows another without apparent logic, and nothing is pursued long enough to hold our attention through the narrator's shifts from one time frame and skein of relationships to the next...
...That we are all one flesh—and that the flesh has eyes until the end...
...Little notes came, assuring them of health, grateful for supplies, mentioning their quality...
...Books telling you straight out what to think—or diarists deciding...
...All lives are legendary...
...And the character would be noble...
...Or an inversion...
...the intimate interconnectedness between persons and events that is revealed only in time, through reflection and dialogue...
...Still, the stars in the usual sense are, in addition to the narrator, a marvelous blind couple by the name of Ev-ams and the androgynous Aunt Leo (a third bobby-soxer), who brings Calish-er's gifts into full play...
...Far as they could tell the closed room remained as clean and sweet as the bathroom did...
...He was instructed to ask the librarians as well, for other books on conduct...
...Worse, once we are in a position to discover the sense in events and conversations that were initially enigmatic we may have forgotten them...
...But it says what it says...
...The third week Leo issues a note to her nephew asking for books—Montesquieu, Pascal, "and a man named Gide who might still be alive...
...Instead, they began to feel that they were helping...
...Anotecame —'if you hear pacing, it's just exercise.' No pleas for something special or extra, as from the invalid or the wounded, ever came...
...The novel's drive, then, has to come from the narrator herself—an actress, now 40, absorbed in piecing together what happened some 25 years earlier in a small New Jersey town when she, like the girl of the title, was a bobby-soxer...
...I am standing at the double knot of my own legend, as we all are, in every part of every nation, and most of all in the nation of the dead...
...Whereas a good mystery yarn keeps its readers firmly in hand while teasing them along, The Bobby-Soxer—no mystery story, yet a story meant to be full of mystery—has us continually turning back in search of what we assume we must have missed...
...At the end of the novel we learn that the two-line inscription on Leo's tombstone reads I LIVE YOUR LIFE/DO YOU LIVE MINE...
...When she is 17, her fiance finds to his horror that she is anatomically male as well as female, and Leo discovers that the body she had taken for granted and thought she shared with her sisters is in fact quite peculiarly hers—or "his...
...In The Bobby-Soxer there is another theme as well—"the haunted provincialism in Americanlife," as one character puts it...
...as tantamount to the mystery of sex itself, of conjunction and individuality, difference-in-sameness, same-ness-in-difference...
...I haven't yet gathered in all the threads of my own, nor will I ever...
...An omission...
...But Calisher has constituted her too thinly, and the book tends to stall...
...We are in a familiar tonal world of plot and character...
...The author' s view appears to be that anyone who enters the life of a small town is so implicated in its events as to deserve the marquee...
...Born as her mother dies and raised by her sister Nessa (the narrator's grandmother) , Leo grows up sexually innocent, in a household where communal modesty is so much the rule that the children, or the girls at any rate, never see each other naked...
...and for me, at least, the narrative is not sufficiently compelling...
...Reviewed by Marcia Cavell The themes of Hortense Calisher's latest novel will be familiar to readers of her earlier works: how we live each other's lives, discovering ourselves and them in the process (her short stories are full of such wonderfully strange identifications...
...Trays, if not eaten bare, were never sent back without something gone...
...Others will do that for me...
...because in her grandmother's eyes she is Leo's "living image...
...Unfortunately, I suspect many readers will not make it through the first...
...Leo did not leave them to despair...
...This is the cued house where I learned that the hours flow under the hand like holy braille...
...But his diagnosis does not resolve the ambiguity she embodies—and will ponder for the rest of her life...
Vol. 69 • June 1986 • No. 9
