Threesome
Gray, Francine du Plessix
Threesome WORLD WITHOUT END by Francine du Plessix Gray (Simon and Schuster. 314 pp. $12.95). "The Love of Three Francines" might have been a less resounding but more descriptive title for...
...While her characters demonstrate three intelligent people's responses to our time— worldly acceptance and involvement (Sophie), commitment to social change and personal purification (Claire), aesthetic withdrawal and cynical detachment (Edmund)—they also clearly reflect the author's own ambivalences...
...Gray has been involved in some of the causes that Claire espouses and also in the celebrity world that Sophie grew up in and returns to...
...Their life stories are told during their tour in flashbacks which are filled in like exquisite mosaics until the total picture is achieved...
...The three, who had known each other as adolescents on Nantucket, have maintained their close friendship into their middle forties, when they agree on a "truth-in" reunion in the Soviet Union...
...Her writing style may sometimes seem excessively executed, but it is also more literate than the pop style of many chroniclers of our era...
...Claire is still partially involved in her causes, and Edmund begins to paint again...
...The Love of Three Francines" might have been a less resounding but more descriptive title for Francine Gray's elegant new novel...
...Her most persuasive character is Edmund, the painter-aesthete who retreats from the faddish world of crass commercialism into the academic world of art history...
...Gray's painter husband has obviously affected her plot as well as her richly visual descriptions...
...After the Soviet reunion, Claire and Edmund, a bit anti-climactically, end up together in semi-retirement on Nantucket...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
