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PARTISAN REVIEW
cupies a much more open and empowered world. Where Blanche
only walks through museums, Chloe actually works in one, and
where Blanche comes almost to resemble an ageless and bodiless
figure locked in some mythological frieze, Chloe is, for all her
bookishness, an active contemporary woman living in a world of
sex, of politics, and of sexual politics, In a sense, indeed, Blanche
and Chloe do not inhabit different worlds so much as different ages,
as different in their way as England and America. One might almost
say that the Anglophile Chloe, who wishfully likens life in an
American compound in 1979 Iran to the "life of an eighteenth cen–
tury village, say, in England," is the kind of woman who longs to be
an Anita Brookner heroine but is doomed by circumstance to inhabit
a much more modern world.
All of which is another way of suggesting that Johnson's set–
tings are much more banal than Brookner's impressionistic land–
scapes, yet also more exciting. For although Chloe is a modest
homemaker, with quaint habits and PBS tastes, she is also a
decidedly Californian woman, a peroxide blonde who shuns red
meat, sticks to diet drinks, and frankly expresses her admiration for
male bodies. Enthralled by the Islamic veils that she sees as both a
refinement and a repression of the sexual urge, she is more of a
feminist, and less of one, than Blanche could ever be, at one moment
maintaining, rather stridently, that "to the eye of a guard, all women
are interchangeable," at the next wondering dreamily "how Muslim
men were in bed. Maybe they were terrific, intense, insatiable; you
heard of men with harems who had to do it ten times a day."
Chloe brings to Shiraz, in short, both a mind overstuffed with
rose-colored images of pavilioned sensuality torn from some unex–
purgated copy of
The Arabian Nights,
and a highly realistic openness
to romance quickened by the last-minute disturbance that has kept
her husband at home. For more than two hundred pages,
Persian
Nights
is little more, in fact, than a matter-of-fact account of Chloe's
unsettled and exhilarated impressions of her strange new home, as
well as a fairly standard tale of Californian suburban life, spiced up
with thoughts of dysentery. In true soap-opera fashion, the Ameri–
can couples in the medical community in Shiraz swap partners, gasp
at poverty, discuss their therapists, and long for egg creams.
Persian Nights
is saved from becoming just another story about
analysts and adulterers only by the menacing, fleetingly glimpsed
presence of Iran in the background. For if the Americans in Shiraz
