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PARTISAN REVIEW
Songs - which makes redundant her portentous references to the Bi–
ble. Her beautiful conjuring of the noiseless, weightless swirl of a
snowstorm in which movement and silence fall together makes
gratuitous her begged-for comparison with Mrs. Dalloway. Her in–
termittent astuteness - in noting her heroine Maude's realization,
for example, that with her mother's death she has lost a pet name
and therefore a kind of identity - puts to shame all the studied
subtleties of calling the heroine "I" and "Maud" and "Bert Lasser's
wife" to show how everyone presents different selves to the different
souls he meets.
There is no denying that Howard is a conscientiously observ–
ant writer who registers with wonderful precision the details of com–
muter lifestyles, intellectual trends and social postures. Many of her
interiors have the bright, clean spaciousness of
New Yorker
covers.
She records tone-perfect exchanges ("Out with those boys until this
hour?" asks a concerned mother. "We went to Dunkin' Donuts,"
answers her sullen daughter), coins trenchant phrases (one couple
had become "Christmas Card friends") and even catches fugitive sor–
rows ("What Bert Lasser never quite got was how deeply his wife
feared purposeless days"). Thanks to the density of its prose and the
shrewdness of its choices,
Grace Abounding
does manage to cover a
large amount of ground in a small amount of space. And yet in
spite - perhaps because - of her self-consciousness, Howard often
does little more than trick up a melodrama in the season's latest
literary fashions. Her shortcomings, moreover, seem the result not
of too little thought, but too much; of plotting not wisely, but too
well. She confuses the stylish with the stylized. And so, at heart, and
beneath
all
the palpitating prose, her novel enjoys little of the tranced
and transporting mustiness of a real American original like Mari–
lynne Robinson's
Housekeeping,
nor even quite the cosmopolitan
poise of Shirley Hazzard's
Transit of Venus. Grace Abounding
has, in the
end, too little witchery and too much craft.
To say that Howard's book comes to resemble the envelope that
Maude finds, "written so nicely and evenly it might be penned by a
schoolmarm or a nun," makes it sound as if it were written by the
relentlessly unfashionable (though currently voguish) Barbara Pym.
Yet for all their similarities, the two could hardly be more different.
For if Howard's characters and devices are unflaggingly sophisti–
cated, Pym's people and prose are above all else straightforward.
Both novelists favor dank, close chambers, but Howard searches for
infinite riches in the little room, where Pym prefers to dwell on - and
