BOOKS
157
class respectability, Mary Lee Settle's latest novel,
Celebration,
is
comic in its effort to affirm the universal value of life. Although the
main part of the novel is set in London in the swinging sixties, the
excursions via narrative or one or the other character's impossibly
long monologues to decadent Hong Kong, mysterious Kurdistan,
and darkest Africa turn this picaresque into a centrifugal, rapidly
disintegrating exploration of the variety and wonders of experience.
The melodramatic wedding and funeral celebrations that conclude
the novel seem in questionable taste in a novel that ostensibly ques–
tions ethnocentricity. The black man is sacrificed; the white people
wed . When the Scottish geologist hero recalls the sound of African
"herbivores" grazing, we might think that this is merely an instance
of the kind of anthropocentrism that could give humanism a bad
name, but when he refers to the "wrinkled dugs" of a black woman
he has murdered, one wonders why Settle has chosen to degrade the
hero and those breasts.
If
the excesses of local color that cram
Celebration
were all one could hope for in a big novel, minimalism
would seem more attractive.
BEVERLY HAVILAND
SEX AND SOCIETY
CROSSINGS. By Marie Josephine Diamond.
Hermes House.
$6.00.
CHRISTINE/ANNETTE. By Albert Guerard. E. P.
Dutton.
$17.95.
THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION. By Stephen McCauley.
Simon and
Schuster.
$17.95.
Contemporary fiction that it is emotionally flat, cool, evis–
cerated, even when it is reviled rather than admired, seems to
dominate critical discourse, diverting positive attention from the
wide range of current works marked by emotional depth and vigor.
The novels of substantial emotion discussed here differ enormously
under various formal fictional subheadings (setting, subject matter,
literary lineage, point of view, voice, tone, style, structure). But they
have a common ambition for fiction: that its varied, powerful re–
sources be put to the service of representing what really matters in
life (inevitably betraying a conviction that something
does
really mat-
