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PARTISAN REVIEW
stories, contrived and hermetic.
Fitzgerald's
Concertina
avoids the overtly mythic strains of
Rope–
Dancer,
aiming for a more straightforward reflection on the life of the main
character, Coriola, from birth to death. But the accelerating complexity of
relationships and events and Coriola's shifting places in her own life (narrating
from a perspective of age three, sixteen, forty, seventy-five) undermine any
linear or realistic psychobiographical scheme. The author seems to want to
pack in as many significant adversities as she can. These move from the
hazards of growing up-anorexia, therapy, dancing
in
strip joints, unsuccessful
love affairs-to, finally, multiple instances of incest which eventually produce
an almost comic effect. Fitzgerald wants to suggest an organic metaphor, the
generations timelessly extending and twisting themselves around each other,
incestuous vines. She wants to show how Coriola's mother's original sin-the
incest but also her repression of Coriola-has poisoned Coriola's life. Indeed
Coriola's life and her narration of it fail to break the cycle of generational er–
rors, fail to take the mother's powers into her own hands. Coriola can't grow
up.
But it's really Coriola's excessive literariness, her brooding over words
and symbolic patterns, that damage her most. Mona Simpson's
Anywhere But
Here
unfolds a destructive mother-daughter relationship too, but Ann August,
the daughter suffering from the curse of her mother's possessive neurosis,
does grow up, and her struggle takes place in a more familiar and realistic
terrain than Coriola's. In spite of some technical lapses, the novel achieves
and sustains one remarkable effect: Ann's ambivalence about her mother
Adele, whose craziness is only gradually and partially revealed, remains taut
throughout the book. Adele's power over Ann, who cannot stop loving her,
remains
in
force until just before the end, sustaining the novel's tensions.
The technical problems in the book have to do partly with structure,
partly with voice. Structurally the book is lopsided, with all the excitement
in
the first half. The sections where Adele and Ann travel to California to find
stardom in Hollywood have the vagrant excitement of a female
On
the
Road.
But in the second half, when Ann engages in a protracted adolescent
struggle with her mother, the novel slows down. The second difficulty, that of
voice, affects the narrative's authenticity. Although several women narrate
the book along with Ann-her grandmother, aunt, and mother-the only voice
that rings true is Ann's. Simpson seems to suggest that Ann is interviewing
her relatives, writing a roots book, instead of letting the characters live.
The title comes from Emerson: "There are three wants which can
never be satisfied; that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting
something different, and that of the traveler, who says, 'anywhere but here'."
In some ways, Simpson makes Adele a female incarnation of the American
