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"the old sow that eats her farrow" than a male chauvinist boar
trampling on a woman's emotional and sexual needs.) Other O'Brien
works star the passive, masochistic waiter-by-the-telephone, and throw
some genuine light on the vulnerability of woman in love (though
twenty-watt when set alongside the classic illuminations of Jean Rhys).
Thus Nora's mad crime and leaky apologia suggest that Ms. O'Brien is
now trying to graft on a more explicit and contemporary kind of
protest:
Certainly I should have killed long ago.
It
was mere blunder and
restraint that sLOpped me. Killed the mad father with the long
gaitered shins, or the suffering mother whose insides I visualized as a
bowl of surping and usurping blood.
The country girl has read Sylvia Plath, listened in on the rape hot line.
With increasing sophistication, Ms. O'Brien's characters and her
style have dragged up their roots in the earthy sensuality which made
her first two Irish novels so powerful. A potential Colette who
dwindled into a Sagan, she is now flirting with a new fashion of
writing whose crude violence disrupts the familiar plangency with
which Nora mourns Hart. The novel does possess a certain cultural
interest in that its doomed heroine introduces Irish martyrology to
sexual politics, at some point on the spectrum between the liberal Ms.
Calisher and the radical Ms. Piercy.
EDNA LONGLEY
