Odd Jobs (65 page)

The novel, written in a swifter and less parenthetical style than Alice Adams sometimes employs, reads easily, even breathlessly; one looks forward, in the chain of coincidences, to the next encounter, knowing that this author always comes to the point from an unexpected angle, without fuss. Momentous scenes are dispatched in a page; Cathy’s life, especially, seems more rumor than reality. Though not short, the book feels edited, by a racing blue pencil that leaps the years. One would have liked to spend more time with these people, who seem even visually underdeveloped. There are too few eye-opening descriptions like this, of Megan’s mother, a carhop waitress grown old:

And this reader would have gladly absorbed even more bits of specifically feminine wisdom than are granted. We learn, for example, that sex is good for your skin and that “it is extremely important, always, to pretend to believe whatever a man is saying … never accuse them of lying.” These insights are courtesy of Lavinia; Megan perceives that men who dislike women express it by marrying a lot of them, and that, sadder still, there is “a connection … between crippledness and romantic extremity.” Only the deformed and self-loathing can really love—that is, idealize—another. To such stark but not unbearable conclusions Megan’s pilgrimage brings her, and to a relationship in which, we are assured, the man and she “exchange a small smile, of the most intense affection.” The traditional joys of motherhood find no place in
Superior Women;
the children are forlorn and deplorable where they are not mercifully absent. Megan’s main discovery, as she approaches sixty, is herself as a daughter;
her path has led back to that basic superior woman, her (or anybody’s) mother.

I
N
S
EARCH OF
L
OVE AND
B
EAUTY
, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 251 pp. Morrow, 1983.

A
LICE IN
B
ED
, by Cathleen Schine. 228 pp. Knopf, 1983.

The title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s new novel evokes that of Proust’s great opus in search of lost time, and much else about the novel is also Proustian: its aristocratic milieu, where there is always enough money to finance romance; its multi-generational scope; its free movements back and forth in time; its frequent scenes of sexual spying; its interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent moral that human love will always find an unworthy object. Louise Sonnenblick, the handsome, robust heroine, born a German (like all of the first generation of these love-and-beauty-seeking characters) and a Protestant, is in love with Leo Kellermann, a pudgy blond pseudo-psychologist who manages in his fifty years of American residency to establish himself as a shady kind of guru. Bruno, Louise’s dapper, dutiful, dainty German-Jewish husband, a wealthy thread-manufacturer in the Old World, is in love with his brazenly faithless wife. Marietta, their daughter and only child, briefly loves and unfortunately marries Tim, the alcoholic scion of an old Hudson Valley family. Mark, their son, a homosexual, loves Kent, a pretty but sluggish American roughneck. Natasha, a homely and prodigiously passive “one-hundred-percent-guaranteed Jewish child” whom Marietta has adopted, loves Mark. Marietta also loves Mark and India—both of them hard to control. And Leo, charmer though he has been, as an old man loves the spacy Stephanie, with whom he is impotent. As if this roll of poorly requited passions were not extensive enough, Mrs. Jhabvala has adorned her elaborate
monument to quixotic cathexis with accessory figures like Janet, one of Leo’s many unhappy and befuddled clients, who is so in love with “an Iranian—or was she an Iraqi?—girl who claimed to be a princess and certainly looked like one” that she slashes her wrists, and Anthony, a middle-aged homosexual who is so in love with Kent that he tries to stab Mark with a carving knife. It is Janet’s story that yields the phrase of the title, “in search of love and beauty,” and it is Anthony’s face that epitomizes our lovelorn misery: “His eyes, when they met Mark’s, were pale and drained of color as though washed by nights of tears.” Later, Natasha sees “that his eyes were washed and dimmed not only by these recent tears but by days and nights and years of them.” These last quotations indicate one respect wherein this novel does not resemble Proust—a certain hurried flatness of the prose; the authorial voice assumes a tone of gossip and summation before the characters have earned our interest and, briskly racing around the ambitious territory staked out, does not always provide the specificity of which this fine writer is capable. In Proust’s interweave of romantic delusions, the glory of the descriptions, as the narrator strives to recapture the past, redeems everyone, even characters as tawdry as Jupien and Morel; in
In Search of Love and Beauty
no one is redeemed.

Yet the novel contains a world of knowing and many vivid scenes that in sum yield a colorful picture of what America meant to the upper-class Germans who immigrated here during the Thirties, and what they made of it. Like the Russians who came to Berlin a decade before, they retained as much of their social and actual furniture as possible. Bruno, who goes walking in Central Park in spats and a dove-gray homburg, feels most at home in his “large, lofty” West Side apartment: “not only was it filled with his family furniture but it also had the same high ceilings, vestibule and corridor, and sliding doors between the living and dining rooms as [his ancestral] house in the Kaiserallee.” Louise’s chic friend Regi, in contrast, has a Park Avenue apartment “done up in the Bauhaus style she had brought with her as absolutely the latest thing,” with glass-and-chrome furniture and white wolf rugs. As Leo Kellermann charms both women into aiding his nebulous enterprises, both apartments are called into service: “Since Regi’s apartment was starkly modernistic with a lot of empty space, it was more suitable for the physical expression classes; while the theoretical lectures remained at Louise’s.” To cater to the German refugee community, a posh restaurant called the Old Vienna opens—“the deep-blue buttoned banquettes, the
velvet curtains with gold-fringed valances over panels of white lace, the chandeliers hanging down as thick and fast as paper lanterns”—and here at the center row of tables Louise and Regi, in girlhood called The Inseparables and now, like the century, in their thirties, make a splendid impression: “Their legs were too long to fit under the table, so they kept them crossed outside, long and smooth in silk. Both were elegantly dressed—Louise in one of her sober, well-cut suits of very expensive material with a fox-fur piece around her neck; and Regi much more flamboyantly in a long-skirted, clinging crêpe de Chine dress with masses of jewelry hung like booty all over her.” With this vision indelibly in mind, the reader follows the two Teutonic beauties back and forth over the years, until the grisly last scenes of senility and death are attained.

Marietta, of the second generation, had no European girlhood to shape her, and in her American unease turns toward India, the site of most of Mrs. Jhabvala’s previous fiction. A sure affection relaxes and lifts the prose when it describes Ahmed, the musician (he plays the sarod) whom Marietta takes as a lover, and Sujata, the huge female singer who, raised as a courtesan, supports a typically extensive Indian household where Marietta becomes a guest. Sujata, too, has had a career of painful loves—her son’s father “had been a pimp and occasionally a pickpocket, an unworthy youth in every way”—and her son is a replica of his father and “now, what was worst of all, worse than anything, Sujata was in love again.” But Indian philosophy, unlike that of German Americans, can accommodate these ruinous lurches of the heart:

The third generation, with its credit cards and drugs and religious sects overseen by charlatans, lacks the concept of glory. Mark, a conscientious child much leaned upon by his husbandless mother, becomes a successful realtor and a suave invert, but runs a constant low fever of depression: “He remembered Anthony’s eyes and a sense of his own future passed through him in a shudder.” Natasha, seeing that Leo, so shrewd a manipulator of others, is helplessly in love himself, is depressed by the thought, “for it seemed to her that there just wasn’t enough love to go
round and never would be—not here, not now—with everyone needing such an awful lot of it.” And so dispirited a conclusion dulls the brilliance of this novel, wherein the characters possess intelligence and ardor but never a sense of choice or a motive for self-sacrifice, and are condemned, even the ebullient Louise, to figure in the universe as no more than witnesses of the inexorable dissolution that time achieves. The permutations and incidents of this chronicle are like Bruno’s displaced and eventually lacklustre furniture: “The convoluted carvings of screens and furniture had an accumulation of dust that seemed to add to their ponderous weight.”

The title of
Alice in Bed
, a sprightly first novel by Cathleen Schine, evokes another Alice, and in truth our nineteen-year-old heroine does seem to be frequently in Wonderland:

The rabbit hole that this Alice, a Sarah Lawrence sophomore from Westport, Connecticut, has fallen down is the chasm of disease—her legs have suddenly ceased to function, her hips have agonizingly fused—and her adventures take place in the madcap underworld of a Manhattan hospital and then a rehabilitation center farther downtown. The marvels of modern medical treatment are scarifyingly, if nonchalantly, portrayed as a farce of brutality and noncomprehension, a kind of
M*A*S*H de luxe
. Though Alice is given all the expert attention her very rich father
can afford, no diagnosis, not even a name, is bestowed upon her affliction. “My doctors have finally come up with a possible diagnosis,” she writes a friend. “I may have osteomyelitis, which means my hips are rotting from an infection. Or I may have aseptic necrosis, which means my hips are rotting, but
not
from an infection. Well! You can imagine how relieved I am to know what’s wrong.” The tall and handsome Dr. Witherspoons (“He took care of famous football teams and was famous himself”) pays a daily visit in which he twists her feet so that she shrieks and sometimes passes out. “The hips never actually moved and neither foot could possibly turn out toward the edge of the bed or in toward the other foot—her joints were unyielding blocks of bone. Why did he insist on twisting this inflamed solid mass?… She thought about it and thought about it, and finally decided Dr. Witherspoons was determining the degree of inflammation from the decibel of her screams.” An especially callous and incompetent nurse, Mrs. Trawling, lets Alice suffer an entire night with worsening phlebitis of the arm rather than pull the I.V. A broken machine would get more care and understanding than Alice, as she describes it. Later, at the rehab center, some of her physical therapists are at least seen as torturers with a purpose, and the nameless surgeon who finally operates on her hips is spared, by way of thanks, being characterized at all.

If the title also suggests one of those demure-appearing “adult” books toward the rear of the paperback rack, this isn’t entirely wrong, either, for our heroine, at the height of her misery and incapacitation, manages to perform what used to be called an unnatural act upon two men both old enough to be her father. When she becomes a bit more able-bodied, she seduces a boy with a broken spine and, to test her new prostheses, “a friendly aide, who brought along a bottle of Ripple.” Not too much is made of any of this, and it is probably realistic. “In the mist of pain and drugs, her thoughts waxed pornographic.… These two men and their organs seemed to be the only things she had any control over, and she would wait in her bed like a despot to exercise her power.” Beneath its gossamer-light prose and schoolgirl jokiness
Alice in Bed
is a saga of the body; as a portrait of
une femme sensuelle moyenne
, a bright upper-class Jewish girl abruptly plunged into a physical nightmare, it is hard to fault. Alice is more than anything bewildered, and focuses on the immediate. She doesn’t aspire to a saint’s fortitude, but she is no Job, either, troubling the heavens with her complaint. Her suffering doesn’t
tie into anything bigger; it is big enough in itself. Ms. Schine creditably solves the curiously technical literary problem of how to represent pain. Since pain, like music, is virtually indescribable, there is little to do but carve a kind of empty space on the page where the impalpable entity would fit: