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PARTISAN REVIEW
dance, and rational idealist in a world beyond reason. Her brother,
Anton, a noted nature photographer, resides in their ancestral Vic–
torian mansion between marriages. Theo takes lodgers. Marybeth
Howe, living under the assumed name ofLynn, is lying low. A fugi–
tive from the sixties, she participated in a bombing that caused an
accidental death. Ouida Senza, a Brazilian immigrant, fears depor–
tation because her former employer confiscated her passport when
she refused his advances. Marybeth, aptly, works for a camera store
called Photophobia; Ouida studies typing and English, and other–
wise spends her time plundering with radiant naivete the religions
and magic of all hemispheres in an effort to hasten universal
harmony. The action begins with the premonitory death of the
Waits's hen at the jaws of a neighbor's dog, develops the conse–
quences of Marybeth's recognition by a nice young man from her
home town, and of Ouida's preparations for a "benefit," a concept
furnished by the local Presbyterian church, by which she hopes to
raise money to buy back her passport. Catastrophe strikes when
Theo, trapped as a hostage in a prison break, is murdered by the
local police.
In
The Shadow Knows,
Johnson spoke through the voice of a
beleaguered young divorcee who recognizes in the tangible signs of
doom - a mutilated door, a phantom phone caller, an insane house–
keeper-emblems of the modern condition. In
Lying Low,
she juxta–
poses points of view and events to dramatize the disparity between
ideals and reality that is the essence of her critique. As in
Shadow,
the
prevailing condition is danger, the salient emotions are anxiety and
fear. But where the horror of the earlier novel explodes in the gothic
scenes of its narrator's living past,
Lying Low
presents the terror of
existence as a daily banality, the reiterated lesson of an American
primer. Instead of maniacal phone calls and mysterious attacks, we
have a series of homely paradigms. Freda Hen killed by Mark the
Labrador illustrates the fragility of life; the wholesome young hus–
band who sells Theo a "Home-Alert" system en route to the Co-op to
buy Sure-jell and paraffin for his wife's "preserving" makes bombs
that will kill Theo. Death hovers over the action, a motif reiterated
in Theo's recollections of the sexually aroused Finn who expired in
her hotel room and the little girl swept from shipboard in a storm.
With appropriate foreboding, Theo fears she is the "angel of death";
Ouida sees death in the shadow of the vacuum cleaner on the wall.
In a world of zodiac murders, freedom is an anachronism, a condi–
tion proclaimed by the innocent elegance of the Wait mansion: iso-
