Grasping Alice Adams, Perhaps
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Grasping Alice Adams, Perhaps Second Chances By Alice Adams Knopf. 257pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Of the eight currently read...
...Uncannily, this evokes a scene in The Coming Race, a 19th-century fantasy by Bulwer Lytton about an underground Utopia ruled by highly developed women...
...And it is true, she is quite sure of that...
...She can start with so many names, unravel such unexciting details of kinship, travel arrangements and shopping lists that you might be reading a Christmas bulletin from your brother-in-law...
...In "Alternatives" "Tom feels an awful guilt toward Avery, for...
...And after another character's speech: "This has been said in the heavily nasal accent with which Ardis imitates extreme snobs...
...It's almost as if she wants to get her word in before the reader's...
...This is the author's own voice...
...No, of course not, as she might answer herself...
...Isn't that about it?' "'Well, yes.' Dudley hurries along beside him...
...His gestures always seem to mock themselves...
...Toward the end Adams even rather halfheartedly involves them in a possible CIA connection, by which she casually kills (offstage) the only two young characters as soon as they have won the reader's sympathy...
...If she doesn't know, who does...
...Of course they do, as Alice Adams might say, or maybe not quite great, she might add...
...smiling and saying 'Oh, you're here!'" Or in this one from the short story "Are you in Love...
...This formula, like any other, has traps for those who follow it blindly, and many writers are caught in it...
...In one recent story she recreates and irradiates the yearning life of a 19th-century small-town spinster poet, leaving us at this late date saddened by that long-ago retreat...
...his persistent 'premature ejaculations,'—and putting the phrase in quotes is not much help...
...Second Chancesis Alice Adams' sixth novel, and her ninth book counting three story collections...
...One of her weaker novels, Rich Rewards, is peppered with the equivalent of "Little did she know...' Echoes of the English writer Fay Weldon are inescapable...
...Or yes, perhaps...
...Then he arrives: "Small, dapper, anxious-looking Brooks, now hurrying toward her (will they kiss...
...It does tell a story of sorts, opening with the concern of Celeste's friends about a mysterious man she has taken up with after her husband's death...
...In "Ripped Off," "Philip talked that hip way somewhat ironically, hiding behind it...
...A worthy purpose, though hardly new to literature, it defeats itself when the pileup of trivia blanks out the hints of consequence...
...In Families and Survivors, the second novel, "...waking in love with Richard (since she loves to kiss him, she must be in love with him, mustn't she...
...Like Adams, Fay Weldon began early to slip in rather wistful questions and speculations about her characters, as if appealing to the reader for help in understanding them...
...Probably not...
...Does Adams worry over her resistance to straight talk...
...But with her new novel, The Hearts and Lives of Men, Weldon has gone beyond the wistful to the willful in exerting authority over the reader, threatening to become, as Terence Rafferty puts it, " a sort of tyrant of fiction...
...But what Adams likes to do is toy with her creations, giving their personalities teasing touches, like the experimental pats and pokes a cat gives its prey, mocking its pretensions to autonomy...
...You might think you were reading Weldon in this scene from Second Chances where Dudley, newly widowed, has nervously waited in a restaurant for her possible lover...
...She has a sense of heightened powers, of newly and acutely sensing what is around her...
...Her stylistic tricks began way back...
...Elaborately Tom hands her the drink...
...The last is quite irrelevant to the story, but sometimes she uses the trick as a blatant bid for suspense...
...shake hands...
...Sometimes worry seems a form of condescension toward a friend, you know?' " Here Adams seems to be hinting at herself, as she did in "Are you in Love...
...Her tricks, though their constant use gives a nervously disjointed effect, entertain and signify...
...The temptation may be there for Adams...
...As these bits of hindsight occur to Adams (the story seems clearly autobiographical) she simply tosses them in...
...All those data seem to be supplied to help us discover (to our surprise) that even purchasers at convenience stores can have lives...
...Alice Munro is never trapped...
...But Tarkington's Alice Adams was a shy, uncertain girl, nothing at all like the confident persona that comes through as Alice Adams the author...
...Niceness is nearly always made questionable by quotes...
...All this should leave no doubt of the Adams talent...
...Alice Adams by her name alone can be confusing, at least to anyone who remembers Booth Tarkington's novel with that title, later a film classic...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Of the eight currently read writers named Alice who come to mind, three have been appearing regularly in the New Yorker, two with five-letter last names...
...The hero is rescued from danger and restored to the upper world by one of the Amazonian goddesses...
...Adams often hides behind (or between) quotation marks...
...Other moments in Second Chances suggest Henry James...
...Early in Second Chances when she has placed in California her cast of elderly sophisticates holding on to dear life, Adams sums up: "And so there they all were, plus Polly Blake, who was (or perhaps she was not, not at all...
...in fact he quietly dies the following year...
...Could it be, as Adams might ask in one of her parenthetical queries, a little too confident...
...Of course she is), Louisa anticipates abeautiful, crystal walk...
...But very bright...
...Yet what if the mannerisms develop without the power...
...Dudley, the journalist-writer in Second Chances, when interrupted by her husband "for the most part is 'nice' about these breaks in her concentration...
...Possibly...
...Of course...
...He is very old...
...So is "love," or " falling in love," as if Adams doubts her character's (or anyone's...
...This is a new thought, highly puzzling, unwelcome, and difficult to digest...
...Could it be that great minds think alike...
...In the midst of a brilliantly believable California conversation she may suddenly drop in a comment that seems to say: "How absurd, how self-consciously intelligent and perceptive these stylish people try to be...
...Consider the following: "Edward frowns, a disclaimer, and he tries to take up their talk...
...She all but forces the reader to accept fiction as inevitably limited to this conscious and open groping toward a conviction, with any verdict subject to immediate appeal...
...Her Canadian characters may be as stylishly "ordinary" as any, with sordid sexual logistics whose moments of lyricism are craftily brought out by indirection, yet in the course of even the grimmest couplings she shows us people who worry us because she worries about them...
...In fact, he says almost everything indirectly...
...one of the reasons for Charles and Celeste settling there in the first place...
...Even while reporting Louisa's current actions Adams explains how her delusional way of seeing things is distorting her judgment, and will keep on causing her trouble...
...She can also abandon trendiness and put her fiction into as formal a shape as a sonnet...
...like many good mimics, she is aping an unacknowledged part of herself...
...Surprised to find that her beauty leaves him cold, he muses in wonder, " Is it that, among the race I belong to, man's pride so far influences his passions that woman loses to him her special charm of womanif he feels her to be in all things eminently superior to himself...
...Her use of them shows a control that is almost arrogant, if not yet dictatorial...
...capacity for emotion...
...Second Chances sometimes seems all speculation...
...Tom is fond of ridiculous jokes but he feels it necessary always to deliver them as though someone else were talking...
...When Adams does commit herself, however, she can be startlingly direct...
...What sets Alice Adams apart from the others—and from most writers now, who strive for the opposite effect—is the elaborate quirkiness of her style...
...Alice Mattison meets all these criteria to an extreme that sometimes makes her stories sound like parodies...
...Adams has always liked to light up a sudden small flare exposing a future event, as in "Alternatives," from her first story collection Beautiful Girl: " ? pronounce you man and wife,' says the minister, who is kindly, thin, whitehaired...
...The three, though different, cause confusion by the surface modishness they share—the obligatory present tense, the effortful appearance of shapelessness, the backhanded, throwaway revelation of what in an old-fashioned story would be the point...
...Or perhaps not simply at all...
...But since you put it like that, should we, really...
...Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women— put off by superior women...
...In the novel Superior Women she is clearly leading the heroine to her own firm conclusion: "Megan wonders: could it have been Connie's very ordinariness that he found appealing...
...Had Alice Adams been reading Bulwer Lytton...
...Is Jessica for the first time observing this...
...What we are saying—aren't we?—is that we're worried about Celeste...
Vol. 71 • September 1988 • No. 16
