458
PARTISAN REVIEW
son, and when the novel opens Bruno is momentarily expected home
from a business trip
to
Scandinavia. These are the literal facts, tersely
presented yet testifying to the substantiality of the novel's bourgeois
world. At the same time there is a persistent sense of incipient trouble
and disorder, stirrings from worlds that daily habit customarily cloak.
Facts are presented as if from an angle slightly askew; phrases and
details do not fit and small oddities of gesture, speech and behavior
quietly erode the sense of general well-being. A description of the
exhausted Bruno arriving at the airport tells us that he always wears a
double-breasted pin-striped suit, walked in his sleep as an infant and
talks in his dreams as a man. The word "bent" comes up just a few
times too often; Marianne is regularly called " the woman" and Stefan
"the child"; and when he writes a school essay on "My Idea of a Better
Life," all the items repudiate his present existence and are themselves
contradictory. And Marianne herself, though very much part of the
depersonalized world, has perceptions that seem at times preternatural.
So when Bruno arranges for a romantic night alone with his wife, we
are ready for almost anything, but not quite for what actually takes
place. The morning after, Marianne tells him of a sudden, unnerving
intuition that he will some day abandon her and orders him
to
leave at
once. As if they were figures in a fairy tale, the man and woman treat
the illumination as peremptory. He moves out and she begins a new
life alone with her son.
All this in the first twelve pages of the novel.
The adaptive process dramatized in the middle section is jagged
and painful, and as convincing as anything of its kind I remember
having read in fiction. Marianne cries unexpectedly and sometimes
sleeps on the floor of her son's room. She rearranges furniture, idles
about the supermarket, and buys more food than she needs. Resuming
work as a translator, she looks for liberating messages in the texts
assigned, but finds only soothing conventional wisdom useless
to
her
now. She refuses to join a women's group, dances alone, sweats a lot,
falls asleep at the movies, takes long walks in the woods, and when she
goes to the mailbox, finds only junk mail, "no handwriting except
perhaps the imitation script of advertising circulars." Sometimes she
talks of looking for contentment, at other times of running amok.
Sitting outdoors in a rocking chair, she does not rock. 'Throughout the
erratic process, she gently ignores the warnings and threats of her
friends and husband-all of whom have stock explanations of what she
has done (historical circumstances, following fashion, etc.) and rejects
their advice as a too-familiar effort to define her in other people's
language.
