160
PARTISAN REVIEW
without distorting the complicated, socially undefined erotic-emo–
tional situations this novel develops. McCauley's central plot ele–
ment is provided by the woman's unintended but unaborted preg–
nancy. In trying to construct a family for this baby, McCauley in–
vestigates both the constraints and the recently-expanded possibil–
ities of "family" - both its congruence and its disjunction with sexual
love. In the freedom from social-sexual stereotypes this novel allows
us to imagine, and in the wealth and generosity of its vision of both
erotic and nonerotic love, it is a gift to its readers.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum from McCauley
(angry, bitter, visionary, despairing) is Marie Josephine Diamond's
Crossings,
another first novel, written in the avant-garde tradition of
surrealism and the
nouveau roman.
While the narrative tone of this
novel is flat and cool, that tone is a device for heightening the impact
of emotion rather than a gauge of its absence.
The unnamed protagonist, always called "she" by the distant
third person narrator, embodies female oppression. "She" plays out
the futility of her desires for love and freedom in a series of chillingly
well realized, Kafkaesque incarcerations and escapes. Diamond
employs a combination of minute local particularity and a pervasive
context of patriarchal-fascistic tyranny. "She" is imprisoned in jails,
hospitals, houses; dominated by husbands, doctors, soldiers, spies–
men invested with violent and absolute power over her. Her at–
tempts at self-assertion and gratification of desire are foredoomed
just as much by her own ambivalence and self-hatred as by her im–
potence. Nevertheless, each scene is excruciatingly re-invested with
hope, desire and cunning: "she" repeatedly musters all her courage
and force of personality to escape, only to find herself imprisoned
again precisely where she thought she would be free. This novel im–
pugns by mesmeric delineation the devastated social-sexual-emo–
tional territory that McCauley (partly) redeems.
MARIANNE DeKOVEN
