BOOKS
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tures through a tinkle of cocktail parties and loveless affairs and col–
lege friends, through the fifties (when everyone is a would-be artist
in Greenwich Village) and the sixties (denoted by psychedelic posters,
trips to San Franciscan hippie asylums and an increasing use of
"cool" and "groovy") and the seventies (by the end , mother, father
and only daughter independently enter therapy and so, perhaps,
achieve their highest goal- being able to talk and talk and talk about
themselves). With that , the book ends.
The novel's protagonist , Michael Davenport, is a featureless,
somewhat feckless fellow made frantic by social insecurities - he will
never recover from going to Harvard or from marrying a millionair–
ess- and pitifully anxious to prove himself to anyone who will listen .
For much of the book, he is little more than a drunken , can–
tankerous , unstable writer who rails against hippies, proles and
faculty people and employs his literary reputation for no greater end
than to hustle sweet and slender young girls. Somewhat surprisingly,
the novel indulges him in this , and fondly allows him to have his
way: Michael sees a deliciously "extraordinary" upper-class English
girl at a party, surrounded by five or six supplicants, and within
twenty lines is treating her to "the first orgasm of her life ." In the
forty pages that follow this improbable conquest, the ill-tempered
brute has also succeeded in bedding a girl with "long, bare legs" eight
days before her wedding and a secretary who had "never cheated on
her boyfriend before" and another pretty young thing who, oohing
and aahing at his poetry, goes so far as to consent to marry him .
Meanwhile, Michael's first wife Lucy is passing through her
own crash course in adult education . As soon as a blue-jeaned kid
appears at her New England doorstep to make a phone call, she
"already knew she wanted him" (and naturally, this strapping young
hunk, equally beloved of most contemporary movies, gives off a
gruff simplicity , drives a beat-up old Ford and shaves shirtless at the
sink) . Hardly has she gone (where else?) to a New School Creative
Writing Workshop than (what else?) she falls in love with (who else?)
her unprepossessing, brilliant, nerve-wracked teacher. On those oc–
casions when Michael and Lucy share their thoughts during their
separation, they say things like, "Know what we did, Lucy? You and
me? We spent our whole lives
yearning.
Isn't that the God damndest
thing?"
Satire? I think not. Yates delivers all this material in a well–
behaved prose that never laughs or roars or soars or cares to distance
itself from the pettiness of its people. Michael rejects Abstract Ex-
