BOOKS
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cannot exist without some degree of artlessness; no amount of calcu–
lation can produce an epiphany. But in an age when we are reminded
on all sides of critics and criteria, when the nature of good writing–
and good reading- is publicly defined again and again , novelists
must often be tempted to listen more closely to the mandates of self–
styled pundits than to the secret urges of the imagination . Novels
these days are more and more often written by the book, dictated not
by the Muse but by a sense of what Great Literature ought to be.
In two recent books, two highly accomplished novelists,
Maureen Howard and Barbara Pym, address the tricks and
treacheries of the wanton unconscious. Yet Howard's artistic method
is as self-conscious as Pym's is self-effacing. And, perhaps not coin–
cidentally, Howard, apparently a cosmopolitan writer au fait with
today's approved fictional strategies, spins an absorbing tale whose
virtues run ahead of its achievements; while Pym, whose mystique
lies in her relative indifference to literary trends, writes an appealing
novel whose whole is more distinguished than its make-up .
Howard's
Grace Abounding
reads, in a sense, as if it were de–
signed to be put together or taken apart in some School of Creative
Writing: All its themes are capitalized for easy digestion, all its sym–
bols spelled out for trouble-free dissection. Every motif is placed just
so, every irony comes thoughtfully gift-wrapped, every metaphor
has been laid out as precisely and tidily as hors d'oeuvres at a fash–
ionable cocktail party. For all its melodious fluency , its metropolitan
refinement, its impeccable manners in entertaining grand American
themes (the loneliness of the imagination, the encroachment of the
prim upon the primitive, the barbaric yawps of the genteel tradition
and the need to balance loves both sacred and secular, and so to find
a religion that is a form of love and a love that is a form of sacra–
ment),
Grace Abounding
seems, in its subtle way, to be anything but
subtle.
Such schooled artfulness and calculated helpfulness are dis–
appointing, I think, given Howard's distinct gift for evocation and
ellipsis . She seems intent upon presenting the lovely sylph of her
prose in the one context - a hermeneut's seminar- where its ele–
gance and grace will be least appreciated. For there is no disputing
that the novel's plangent phrases fall just right. Its incantatory,
cloistral rhythms both advance the story and cast shadows on its sur–
face. Lullaby and threnody chime in its clean cadences; church bells
toll through it moody sentences. Yet it is precisely the knelling elo–
quence of Howard's opening- a kind of spinster's Song of
