748
PARTISAN REVIEW
der its: "I wasn't enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew.
And his being blind bothered me.<My idea of blindness came from
the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed.
Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my
house was not something I looked forward to." The story spirals, by
the most gossamer of strokes, into an epiphany- a moment of vision
so subtle you could almost miss it. The blind guest aides his reluc–
tant host, whom he insists on calling "bub" (one of those strokes), in
the drawing of a cathedral, which he has never seen, on an emptied
shopping bag: "I put in windows with arches. I drew flying but–
tresses. I hung great doors, I couldn't stop...."
"A Small, Good Thing," although expert, is a little more con–
trived; I didn't quite believe in one of the characters, a baker who
transcends his own malevolent hostility and becomes a life-giving
benefactor. (What I doubted was the extent of the original hostility,
which is integral to the plot; why would a baker, even a tormented
one in a Raymond Carver story, harass a customer for failing to pick
up a birthday cake she has ordered for her son? Don't bakers have
better things to do?) But this is a mere quibble, not a full-fledged
grievance. The story works, and it imparts a strange, awkward
radiance.
And this, finally, is how it looks to be in the world of words,
where novels and volumes of short stories keep tumbling out pell–
mell- defying, like "the amorous subject" itself, "the thousand forces
of the world which are, all of them," Roland Barthes confirmed, "dis–
paraging forces." There is, with all my misgivings about some of the
new writing, no dearth of talent. Some of the most interesting novels
seem to take as their starting point that lovely, penetrating line of
Auden's: "The desires of the heart are as crooked as cork-screws."
Mary Morris, for instance, has written a novel,
Crossroads,
which is a
quietly acute examination of a contemporary woman who is caught
between what she genuinely wants from men and her notions of what
she should choose in men. Some months back there was Gwyneth
Craven's
Love and Work,
which described the clamor and eventual
longeurs of an office romance with unfailing intelligence.
Two of the more resonant of recent novels have had exotic set–
tings.
My
Old Sweetheart
(that's the one my blonde book-seller sold
with his heart), a first novel by Susannah Moore, uses its locale,
Hawaii, to great effect. Although uneven, the novel is most moving
in its depiction of that first and most fixated of obsessions, mother–
love. And Wendy Law-Yone's
The Coffin Tree
is a dark gem of a
novel, about a Burmese brother and sister who are deposited and
abandoned to their own resources in New York City. The ferocity of
