BOOKS
343
FICTION CHRONICLE: THE NAMES OF LOVE
WEDDING DANCE. By Anne de Tourville. Translated by Mervyn Savill.
Farrar, Straus
&
Young. $3.00.
THE DISGUISES OF LOVE. By Robie Macauley. Random House. $3.00.
THIS HAPPY RURAL SEAT. By George Lanning. World. $3 .50.
NINE DAYS TO MUKALLA. By Frederic Prokosch. Viki ng. $3.00.
LIMBO. By Bernard Wolfe. Random House. $3.50.
NATURAL CHILD. By Calder Willingham. Dial. $3.50.
NO NAM E IN TH E STREET. By Kay Cicellis. Grove Press. $3.00.
THE LOVED AND THE UNLOVED. By
Fran~ois
Mauriac. Translated by
Gerard Hopkins. Pellegrini
&
Cudahy. $3.00.
Scratching, kissing, and biting are too direct for the modern
psyche. Love is intransitive, in so far as the eight novels under review,
all of which are in one way or another about love, the attempt to love,
the failure in love, lead to any conclusion. But perhaps these novels are
not about love at all but about the complicated egos of dissatisfied and
disappointed persons who have no genuine faith, hope, success, or
tragedy in their lives.
Wedding Dance
is a refreshing exception, for it has a pair of lovers
whose whole beings are bent toward the consummation of their love.
It is like a drink of spring water to encounter simple emotions: love,
fear, anger, greed; delight, terror, and need. This novel, which won
the Prix Femina for Anne de Tourville, is one that anyone would like
to read, anyone that is who does not resentfully characterize all unam–
biguous emotions as trite. For this novel has the vivid detail, the sharp
characterization, the kinetic poetry of a fairy tale. At the same time
the social context of peasant life in Brittany is never out of focus, and
there are many humorous and satirical incidents. Love, begun in private,
must end in public, and the world has many values that are inimical
and hostile to love.
The Disguises of Love,
a first novel by Robie Macauley, is also
about love; but what it is really about is an emotional and spiritual
void. There is a great deal of discussion today about middle-class values,
the solid values of kindly, cultivated, and relatively secure people.
Whether these values are more than the perforated shell of an ant hill
from
which all the ants have departed is the problem Robie Macauley
raises. His three characters, Professor Howard Graeme, his wife, Helen,
and
his
son, Gordon, alternately describe their interwoven lives. While
the
focus of the plot is the love affair Howard Graeme is having with
one of his students, the focus of meanings is the recognition scene which
each member of the family is playing with himself. Helen Graeme, the
