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PARTISAN IliVIEW
must-and her epiphany will serve to put a stop to an interminable dis–
CUSSlOn.
And yet, this novel which is, at times, more lyric than novel, may right–
ly be taken as a moving exploration-perhaps a self-exploration, for its
author. In
The Golden Notebook,
Anna Wulf may have spoken for Lessing
when she said that the only kind of novel which interested her was one
"powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create
order," and credited herself with one necessary quality to that end, her
curiosity about life. Lessing's strongest books have expressed her unquench–
able curiosity-from the early
The Grass is Singing,
which dealt with racial
conflict in the Rhodesia of her youth to her relatively recent
The Good
Terrorist,
which imaginatively analyzes the soul of contemporary terrorism
in advanced societies. But this admirable and ambitious wri ter has, for a
moment, anyhow, possibly wearied of her long preoccupation with the
largest themes and cast aside the taste for prophecy expressed in her fiction
about other worlds and the human future. And should she not be allowed a
moment to muse-in her first novel after a silence of eight years-about a
human experience that happens again and yet again in all times and places?
MILLICENT BELL
Henry Roth: An Interim Report
FROM BONDAGE. By Henry R o th.
New York: St. Martin's Press
$25.95.
Because
From Bondage
is the third volume of a projected six-volume
tome entitled
Mercy
of
a Rude Stream,
those who have been following the
Bildungsroman
of Ira Stigman, Roth's protagonist-alter ego, are justified in
wondering just how important these books are likely to be. That they exist
at all is something of a miracle, not only because Roth's writing block has
become the stuff of legend (he had not published anything of size, much
less of significance, since his monumental achievement,
Call It Sleep,
in
1934), but
also
because he produced this torrent of pages in his late eighties.
That
Call
It
Sleep
has been fully absorbed into the canon of twentieth–
century American literature is now beyond dispute, and the novel will
remain a classic so long as there are readers who care about the imagina–
tion and the shape-and-ring of individual paragraphs. For what Roth's
portrait of David Schearl, an immigrant Jewish boy caught between the
