by John Updike
Though there is a good deal of ethnic cross-reference in the text of Superior Women, its many characters fall almost entirely into four groups: blacks, Jews, Irish Americans, and upper-class Wasps. The Wasps are the heavies, with their ghastly clubbiness and haughty prejudices; just their melodious names—Lavinia Harcourt, George Wharton, Potter Cobb, Connie Winsor, Cameron Sinclair, Price Christopher—would make even a middle-of-the-road reader see red, and when the toniest name of them all, Henry Stuyvesant, turns out to have no money and to have once joined the Communist party, we still find it hard to love him. Whereas the blacks are beautiful people: Jackson Clay a great musician, if a little stoned in his later, Hawaiian phase, and Cornelia loyal and gentle and so intelligent that just a perfunctory sprinkling of money turns her from a cook into a schoolteacher, and Vera, who is Mexican and only looks black, the perfect match at last for dear, big, good-hearted Peg. The Jews, too, are beyond reproach. Whatever the job set before them, they do it: Janet Cohen Marr becomes a good intern (“Considered very able, I believe,” Dr. George Wharton grudgingly admits), and her son Aron has written “a very good novel,” about a gay relationship; Barbara Blumenthal, the literary agent who hires Megan, “is a very successful woman, who manages at the same [time] to be quite simply nice”; and Simon Jacoby, to whom Megan entrusts her defloration, does it ably and nicely. Blacks and Jews, in this book, are invariably figures of comfort. Wasps represent privilege and power; their hegemony, covertly asserted in a conspiracy of correct schools and addresses, of intertwining acquaintanceships and similar family antiques, becomes overt in the sinister figure of Harvey Rodman, a crippled and fantastically rich insider in the administration of Richard Nixon. He boasts to Lavinia, “It’s exciting how few people we’ve managed to get it down to, just a very few, in total control. There’s not much spreading around these days, baby doll, in terms of real power.” And, somewhat like Fu Manchu in bygone days, “he laughs, excitingly.” Only the Irish have in them the potential to be good or bad—to be human, in short. Adam Marr, though he doesn’t seem—“light brown curly hair, a big nose, thin face, and large, intense blue eyes”—very Irish, is labelled as such and clearly designed, with his sensitivity and outrageousness, to arouse ambivalent feelings in the reader; Cathy Barnes, too, remains mysterious, as her wit turns to bitterness, and her austerity to martyrdom. Megan Greene, the heart and heroine of the novel, oscillates between her “strong, eager needs” and her habit of getting top marks, between her sexual and her intellectual prowess, between her passion for the circumspect Henry James and her headlong falls into love.
Lavinia and Megan are, like the two little girls of “Roses, Rhododendron,” matched opposites: “tall thin blond, impeccably expensively dressed Lavinia—and plump dark Megan, in her slightly wrong California clothes.” The compounded attraction and repulsion between them should be the axis of the novel, around which its many lesser worlds turn. If this doesn’t quite work, it is not for any failing of vitality and believability on Megan’s part but because Lavinia doesn’t get, as a character, a fair shake. Her purported intelligence (“Actually, perhaps surprisingly, Lavinia herself has a remarkably high IQ; in those numerical terms the two girls are identical”) is buried under the reflexive snobbery, the feral schemingness, the ossified narcissism that the author loads upon her, for political reasons: she symbolizes the sterility of the haves. Too rarely is Lavinia allowed to shed the accoutrements of her class. Toward the end, she and Megan have parallel breakdowns, and for a moment, dreadfully feeling her fifty years of self-indulgent, wasted life, she stands naked and confused: “But then she begins to cry again—crying, shivering, everything out of control, nothing as intended, as meant. She is an ugly white old woman, all gooseflesh, crying, crying, and every single minute getting older, uglier.” Momentarily rescued, by Megan’s lover, from this ugliness, she uses the rescue to perpetrate ugliness of her own design; the author restores her to her formal status as “rich and beautiful and rich and wicked” and drops her from the novel like a used-up poppet. She has amounted to less than we might have hoped from the Radcliffe pages. Megan, self-described as “poor and innocent and slightly simple,” is intended to command our sympathy, and does; but are we supposed to feel something lamely collegiate about her life’s culmination, in 1983, at a feminine dormitory in the Georgia hills, meddling in good works among the Atlanta underclass and snuggling into her weekend visitations from a Chapel Hill professor? Are we supposed to suspect that her tried-and-true beau, his physical charms detailed down to (or up to) his giraffelike eyelashes, is just a senior wimp? They once intended to marry, but put it off for one of the strangest reasons in romantic fiction: they were depressed by the election of Richard Nixon as President. “Both Megan and Henry find it surprising that this event should be a factor in their personal lives, but the truth is that they are both so depressed by Nixon that they are stunned into a sort of immobility.” Superior Women, indeed, makes much of Nixon, who may end by finding his way into more works of the literary imagination than any executive since King Arthur. World War II whisks by in a hazy flecking of uniforms, and of Korea and Kennedy’s assassination there is not a mention, but Nixon and Watergate get right into bed with Ms. Adams’s characters, causing impotence in one instance and celibacy in another.
Internal references indicate that the author had in mind, as models for this narrative, the schoolgirl novels of Jessie Graham Flower and Jane Austen’s novels of female education and (as a graduation prize) marriage. The superior women, at college, entertain no expectation higher than the materialization of “the knight (ah! Mr. Knightley!), the perfect figure of romance.” As Nina Auerbach, in her fine Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, has pointed out, the women in Austen are waiting for the door to open, and the gentlemen to enter. Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice can scarcely stand the suspense: “Anxious and uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room, before the gentlemen came, was wearisome and dull to a degree, that almost made her uncivil. She looked forward to their entrance, as the point on which all her chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.” Over a century later, the girls of Barnard and Bertram Halls are still pinning their chance of pleasure on the male visitors, though the dates as described are horror shows of compulsory drunkenness and frantic fumbling. The girls stagger back to the dorm like shell-shocked soldiers from the front, and even good-natured Megan is hard-pressed to find the bright side of being pawed on the cold dirt underneath a Charles River bridge. And yet, though four of the five become career women of a sort, their lives are chronicled in terms of amorous discovery and conquest, of multiple orgasms and helpless heartbreak. Looking back on the college years, Megan reflects, “The fact that Phil-Flash was on the whole a jerk now seems less important than that with him Cathy was confident, and happy. As she so visibly now is not.”a As the novel progresses, the reader’s heart learns to sink whenever a white heterosexual male enters the scene, for to a man they are crude, exploitive, and ultimately feckless. The black Jackson Clay doesn’t disappoint, of course, nor do Megan’s Paris pal Danny and her New York pal Biff; both are homosexuals. Naturally Megan asks herself, “Are gay men really nicer than so-called straight men?” Adam Marr, for whom she has always felt an unaccountable sneaking fondness, turns out to have been a closet homosexual, which explains the fondness. The plight of the superior woman, as he once explained it to Megan, is that “Just any old guy won’t do. You wouldn’t like him, and even if you did your strength would scare him.… Inferior men are afraid of you.” Since, on the evidence marshaled here, all men are inferior, the plight is universal. Stop watching the door, ladies, and ask yourselves to dance.
The novel, written in a swifter and less parenthetical style than Alice Adams sometimes employs, reads easily, even breathlessly; one looks forward, in the chain of coincidences, to the next encounter, knowing that this author always comes to the point from an unexpected angle, without fuss. Momentous scenes are dispatched in a page; Cathy’s life, espe
cially, seems more rumor than reality. Though not short, the book feels edited, by a racing blue pencil that leaps the years. One would have liked to spend more time with these people, who seem even visually underdeveloped. There are too few eye-opening descriptions like this, of Megan’s mother, a carhop waitress grown old:
Her hair, for so many years bleached and dyed a brassy bright blond … now has grown out several inches, at least two, past blond to white, a bright clean white, as startling in its way as the blond hair was. Her face is weathered, tanned. “Rain or shine, I walk my five miles a day, and sometimes more. I like it outdoors,” Florence has explained. “May have ruined my skin, though. Doctors tell us everything too late, it seems like to me.” Her skin is less ruined than it is intensely wrinkled. With her small nose and round brown eyes, and the violent band of white hair, she has the look of a monkey, an impression increased by the animation, the energy involved in all her gestures, her facial expressions.
And this reader would have gladly absorbed even more bits of specifically feminine wisdom than are granted. We learn, for example, that sex is good for your skin and that “it is extremely important, always, to pretend to believe whatever a man is saying … never accuse them of lying.” These insights are courtesy of Lavinia; Megan perceives that men who dislike women express it by marrying a lot of them, and that, sadder still, there is “a connection … between crippledness and romantic extremity.” Only the deformed and self-loathing can really love—that is, idealize—another. To such stark but not unbearable conclusions Megan’s pilgrimage brings her, and to a relationship in which, we are assured, the man and she “exchange a small smile, of the most intense affection.” The traditional joys of motherhood find no place in Superior Women; the children are forlorn and deplorable where they are not mercifully absent. Megan’s main discovery, as she approaches sixty, is herself as a daughter; her path has led back to that basic superior woman, her (or anybody’s) mother.
Louise in the New World, Alice on the Magic Molehill
IN SEARCH OF LOVE AND BEAUTY, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 251 pp. Morrow, 1983.
ALICE IN BED, by Cathleen Schine. 228 pp. Knopf, 1983.
The title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s new novel evokes that of Proust’s great opus in search of lost time, and much else about the novel is also Proustian: its aristocratic milieu, where there is always enough money to finance romance; its multi-generational scope; its free movements back and forth in time; its frequent scenes of sexual spying; its interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent moral that human love will always find an unworthy object. Louise Sonnenblick, the handsome, robust heroine, born a German (like all of the first generation of these love-and-beauty-seeking characters) and a Protestant, is in love with Leo Kellermann, a pudgy blond pseudo-psychologist who manages in his fifty years of American residency to establish himself as a shady kind of guru. Bruno, Louise’s dapper, dutiful, dainty German-Jewish husband, a wealthy thread-manufacturer in the Old World, is in love with his brazenly faithless wife. Marietta, their daughter and only child, briefly loves and unfortunately marries Tim, the alcoholic scion of an old Hudson Valley family. Mark, their son, a homosexual, loves Kent, a pretty but sluggish American roughneck. Natasha, a homely and prodigiously passive “one-hundred-percent-guaranteed Jewish child” whom Marietta has adopted, loves Mark. Marietta also loves Mark and India—both of them hard to control. And Leo, charmer though he has been, as an old man loves the spacy Stephanie, with whom he is impotent. As if this roll of poorly requited passions were not extensive enough, Mrs. Jhabvala has adorned her elaborate monument to quixotic cathexis with accessory figures like Janet, one of Leo’s many unhappy and befuddled clients, who is so in love with “an Iranian—or was she an Iraqi?—girl who claimed to be a princess and certainly looked like one” that she slashes her wrists, and Anthony, a middle-aged homosexual who is so in love with Kent that he tries to stab Mark with a carving knife. It is Janet’s story that yields the phrase of the title, “in search of love and beauty,” and it is Anthony’s face that epitomizes our lovelorn misery: “His eyes, when they met Mark’s, were pale and drained of color as though washed by nights of tears.” Later, Natasha sees “that his eyes were washed and dimmed not only by these recent tears but by days and nights and years of them.” These last quotations indicate one respect wherein this novel does not resemble Proust—a certain hurried flatness of the prose; the authorial voice assumes a tone of gossip and summation before the characters have earned our interest and, briskly racing around the ambitious territory staked out, does not always provide the specificity of which this fine writer is capable. In Proust’s interweave of romantic delusions, the glory of the descriptions, as the narrator strives to recapture the past, redeems everyone, even characters as tawdry as Jupien and Morel; in In Search of Love and Beauty no one is redeemed.
Yet the novel contains a world of knowing and many vivid scenes that in sum yield a colorful picture of what America meant to the upper-class Germans who immigrated here during the Thirties, and what they made of it. Like the Russians who came to Berlin a decade before, they retained as much of their social and actual furniture as possible. Bruno, who goes walking in Central Park in spats and a dove-gray homburg, feels most at home in his “large, lofty” West Side apartment: “not only was it filled with his family furniture but it also had the same high ceilings, vestibule and corridor, and sliding doors between the living and dining rooms as [his ancestral] house in the Kaiserallee.” Louise’s chic friend Regi, in contrast, has a Park Avenue apartment “done up in the Bauhaus style she had brought with her as absolutely the latest thing,” with glass-and-chrome furniture and white wolf rugs. As Leo Kellermann charms both women into aiding his nebulous enterprises, both apartments are called into service: “Since Regi’s apartment was starkly modernistic with a lot of empty space, it was more suitable for the physical expression classes; while the theoretical lectures remained at Louise’s.” To cater to the German refugee community, a posh restaurant called the Old Vienna opens—“the deep-blue buttoned banquettes, the velvet curtains with gold-fringed valances over panels of white lace, the chandeliers hanging down as thick and fast as paper lanterns”—and here at the center row of tables Louise and Regi, in girlhood called The Inseparables and now, like the century, in their thirties, make a splendid impression: “Their legs were too long to fit under the table, so they kept them crossed outside, long and smooth in silk. Both were elegantly dressed—Louise in one of her sober, well-cut suits of very expensive material with a fox-fur piece around her neck; and Regi much more flamboyantly in a long-skirted, clinging crêpe de Chine dress with masses of jewelry hung like booty all over her.” With this vision indelibly in mind, the reader follows the two Teutonic beauties back and forth over the years, until the grisly last scenes of senility and death are attained.
Marietta, of the second generation, had no European girlhood to shape her, and in her American unease turns toward India, the site of most of Mrs. Jhabvala’s previous fiction. A sure affection relaxes and lifts the prose when it describes Ahmed, the musician (he plays the sarod) whom Marietta takes as a lover, and Sujata, the huge female singer who, raised as a courtesan, supports a typically extensive Indian household where Marietta becomes a guest. Sujata, too, has had a career of painful loves—her son’s father “had been a pimp and occasionally a pickpocket, an unworthy youth in every way”—and her son is a replica of his father and “now, what was worst of all, worse than anything, Sujata was in love again.” But Indian philosophy, unlike that of German Americans, can accommodate these ruinous lurches of the heart:
Then she grew very serious and very seriously she asked Marietta, as though expecting her to have the answer, that if it was so wrong to have these feelings, then why were they sent? If it was wrong, if it was shameful, then why was it there? And why was it so glorious?
The third generation, with its credit cards and drugs and religious sects overseen by charlatans, lack
s the concept of glory. Mark, a conscientious child much leaned upon by his husbandless mother, becomes a successful realtor and a suave invert, but runs a constant low fever of depression: “He remembered Anthony’s eyes and a sense of his own future passed through him in a shudder.” Natasha, seeing that Leo, so shrewd a manipulator of others, is helplessly in love himself, is depressed by the thought, “for it seemed to her that there just wasn’t enough love to go round and never would be—not here, not now—with everyone needing such an awful lot of it.” And so dispirited a conclusion dulls the brilliance of this novel, wherein the characters possess intelligence and ardor but never a sense of choice or a motive for self-sacrifice, and are condemned, even the ebullient Louise, to figure in the universe as no more than witnesses of the inexorable dissolution that time achieves. The permutations and incidents of this chronicle are like Bruno’s displaced and eventually lacklustre furniture: “The convoluted carvings of screens and furniture had an accumulation of dust that seemed to add to their ponderous weight.”