BOOKS
297
From Bildungsroman to Family Saga
THE SWEETEST DREAM. By Doris Lessing. HarperCollins.
$26.95.
IN
HER
LONG
CAREER, Doris Lessing has used many genres and has never
left them as she found them. The first three volumes of
Children of Vio–
lellce
resemble other twentieth-century bildungsroman in their social
realism. In the fourth volume,
Landlocked,
Zambesia exists only in
Martha's consciousness, and in
The Four-Gated City,
the final volume,
consciousness is as little to be depended upon as memory. Psychological
breakdowns preface the future history that ends the novel with a global
catastrophe which destroys the nations of Europe and North America.
Her latest novel,
The Sweetest Dream,
is a family saga, a genre that
Doris Lessing has not written in before. Characteristically, the novel is
as much about the fluidity of the arbitrary relationships that create the
family as it is about the certainties of family despite the changing world
to which each generation has to adapt. The fixed point in
The Sweetest
Dream
is the Lennox home, a many-storied house in Hampstead. There
is a literal family, the Lennoxes, but several of the people that belong to
the house are Lennoxes neither by blood nor by marriage.
Phillip Lennox, of the first generation, works for the Foreign Office,
but the glamour of diplomatic postings is denied him because Julia,
whom he marries just after the First World War, is German. Phillip dies
shortly after the end of the Second World War, and until her death in the
mid-
[980S
Julia owns the house, living on the top floor, surrounded by
beautiful furniture and trying to ignore what she regards as the disorder
on the floors below. Their son becomes a Communist at Eton and funs
away to fight Franco. Although he never gets further than the East End
of London, he exploits his reputation as a hero of the Spanish Civil War
in order
to
become a person of considerable consequence in the British
Left. His first wife, Frances, is the closest the novel has to a central char–
acter. Her children and their friends make up the third generation, and
the children of her lover the nucleus of the fourth. Actor and journalist,
she also presides over the kitchen and its huge table, at which she feeds
anyone in the house. Frances's meals become a secular form of the
Eucharist, a grateful confirmation of the possibility of communion in a
society where identity and alienation seem inseparable and self–
awareness is rooted in self-indulgence.
Lessing's fine sense of irony sets the living community of the Lennox
house, which Julia's money and Frances's hospitality make possible,
