502
ERICA JONG
have to face its disintegration. Raised to be nurturant, they have to face
the fact that most of the world's children are starving. Raised to believe
in progress, reform, socialism, they have to face the resurgence of author–
itarianism. Raised to give their lives to their families, they have to face
the fact that families are obsolete.
Most of the action of the novel is depicted in a detached third
person narrative which resembles the telling of a fable or parable. The
writing is graceful (especially compared to
The Golden Notebook),
slightly ironic, and from Kate's point of view. She is a tireless and pre–
cise observer of everyone, including herself. Yet during the first part of
the book, she seemed such a universal type that she was slightly unreal
to me. (The author seemed to recognize this problem later in the novel,
when she spoke of Kate "evading something by putting [it] in the third
person.") The power of the story became irresistible toward the end,
however, when Kate, back in London and living with a young woman
named Maureen, engages in endless conversations about marriage, moth–
erhood, growing older. These seemed to me the most convincing scenes
in the book: the dialogue not only accurate but profound; not only
convincing for these two particular characters but for all of us.
It
is, I
think, the job of the novel to work from particularity to generality rather
than the other way around. And in these dialogues, Lessing succeeds
brilliantly at stating the dilemmas of contemporary humanity. They are
not resolved, of course. Whether Kate's choice of a quarter century of
childbearing and wifehood was "right" or "wrong" is something neither
Kate nor Lessing can tell us. Whether Maureen ought to imitate Kate
or rebel is also not resolved - either by the characters or the author.
Kate does not
know
whether her choice was "right" and so she cannot
tell Maureen. Lessing certainly does not know, though she implies, by
the resolution of Kate's recurrent dream about a dying seal, that the
maternal virtues Kate exemplifies have some life-giving power after all.
But the very value of life-giving is uncertain in a world where too many
babies are born and many must die. The maternal gifts which Kate has
built her life around are obsolete, and Lessing knows this. Kate also
knows it at the end; but what is she to do? She has been prepared for
nothing else. Her needs and the world's needs are out of step. And
Maureen, though twenty-five years younger, suffers the same discon–
tinuity between her emotions and the outer reality. Maureen's habit of
wearing old clothes ("putting on the clothes of the circumscribed women
of the past") is a perfect metaphor for this. A twentieth-century girl
who loathes the idea of being like her mother, she nevertheless longs for
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