BOOKS
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unnecessary and for a bad photograph it is boring, is applicable here.
The novel is a dependent text, referring always to the dust jacket
pictures, insisting that we look more closely at them, asserting that
they deserve our attention. But after Galloway'S strategies have been
repeated three or four times we begin either
to
be bored by the pictures
or to want to write our own book about them, since they are there for us
to play with. People who like photography, antiques, genealogies, and
body language may find things to savor in
A Family Album,
but on the
whole it is dry and ingrown, all too obedient to, and even trapped in,
its clever conception.
Gail Godwin's characters are also southern, and the heroine of
Violet Clay
is a n illustrator of Gothic novels who specializes in the
portrayal of fleeing heroines . Violet, fresh from a conventional mar–
riage, goes to New York at the age of twenty-four to make her career as
a serious painter, and drifts, like her young amiable Uncle Ambrose,
who cannot seem to finish his second novel, into a deflected existence,
mistaking her slide down the indine of time and circumstance for a
smooth passage to better days and more profitable occasions. Violet
spends nine years falling through her life until the loss of her job, and
then the loss of her uncle, allow her
to
hit bottom and wake herself up.
Godwin has a knack for certain kinds of observation. She sees the
ways in which women behave differently when they are with men; she
sees the ways in which women subvert and smother their own ambi–
tions. And she knows all the contemporary (and ignoble) manifesta–
tions of boredom, envy, social intimidation, loneliness, and procras–
tination-the last of which dominates her heroine's life.
A novel about procrastination, about a woman with inflated ideas
about herself who at the same time doesn't take herself seriously
enough, about a woman who lets time have its way while she sleeps
away her destiny, a novel about a woman who is starting late, who
gives herself an ultimatum and rises from her lethargy, who becomes
wise about her demons ("little creatures like the ones in Bosch
... those are somebody else's demons. They've already been
given a shape.... Whereas, it is the nature of personal demons to be
the last thing you imagine. "), who gets her perspective and sense of
proportion from relationships which are not romantic-is a novel
worth having, and Godwin is canny enough
to
have chosen to write it.
Yet her management of these timely subjects is often clumsy
enough to make us wince. Her plot creaks with the weight of her
intentions, her transitions are awkward, and her characters, strained
