BOOKS
MOTHER;S CURSE
ROPE.DANCER. By M.
J.
Fitzgerald. Random House. $115.95 .
CONCERTINA. By M.
J.
Fitzgerald. Random House. $15.95 .
ANYWHERE BUT HERE. By Mona Simpson.
Random House. $6.95.
SECOND SIGHT. By Mary Tannen. Alfred A. Knopf. $16.95.
683
In all these first novels (except for
Rope-Dancer,
a short-story
collection) by women,the sins of mothers-and their sorrows-are visited upon
their children. Each female protagonist has to escape her mother's power in
order to discover her own. But that struggle necessarily involves, as each
woman faces maturity herself, some conflicted understanding of her mother's
sufferings and mistakes. Ambivalence about the past runs deep in these
narratives and adulterates the women's achievement of selfhood.
M.
J.
Fitzgerald's
Rope-Dancer,
however, does not fit this scheme, being
more concerned with women's present love affairs, many of which are
defined as mythic female-victim stories. In "Creases," a man packs his pliant
lover away in a box when he gets tired of her. In "Perspective on the First
You," the older man with whom the narrator falls in love can't breathe with
her there; she can't breathe without him. Not being able to breathe becomes
the motif of "Phebican" (a name short for Penelope Helen Eve Beatrice I
Circe Albertine Nausicaa) who goes through life with a lead ball pressing
down upon her shoulders and chest. These relentlessly symbolic stories about
women tortured by puerile and faceless men are tiresome.
Some stories in this collection are more satisfying when Fitzgerald takes
time to develop her situation a bit. But even in her more complex plots, for
example "The Fire Eater," which describes a lonely woman falling in love
with a street performer in Rome, the narrator spoils the effect by intervening
obsessively to comment on her own telling of the story, on the writer-reader
power struggle: "now we know what happens, can I wield enough power to
keep you turning the pages if I keep talking instead of getting on with the
story?" Fitzgerald's attempts at making relationships and language reflect
meaningfully upon each other sometimes work-there are brilliant and precise
passages of writing-but the overall effect is, even in the more interesting
