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Lessing's London
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20245 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
1,948 Words |
| Author
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Alexandra Johnson
Alexandra Johnson teaches writing at Harvard University and
has written for the New Yorker, the Nation, the New York
Times Book Review, Ms., and numerous national publications.
She received a 1990 PEN Special Citation for The Novel Self,
a portrait of women writers and their diaries. |
THE REAL THING
Doris Lessing
New York: Harper Collins, 1992
224 pp., $20
In the title story of Doris Lessing's new collection, an American sitting in an English country pub has an uncomfortable insight as she watches various social classes enjoy the Sunday ritual of a prelunch drink. In that "darkish room that had something of the aspects of a cave," she observes,
it was as if some key or root definition, something primal, had only to be made and everyone here would at once agree, but these words had not been said, and never would be, for there was no need for them. In this scene there was something secretive and intimate and deeply shared, something reckless and even dangerous.
Although Jody, the character in question, is referring specifically to Britain's notorious class distinctions, her observation will be borne out on a more primal level with her weekend companions. Sharing a cottage with her fiancé and his former spouse, she comes to see that certain collective truths so easily said between husband and wife, man and woman, not only are never uttered but are consciously avoided. Like so many characters in The Real Thing, what she mistakes for English reserve is in fact more fundamental--a stubborn, often deliberate, human miscommunication.
In this latest collection of short stories, all played out against the backdrop of contemporary London, the city serves as metaphor for the circumscribed geography of the human heart. In the eighteen stories here, Lessing deepens the themes that have preoccupied her fiction: the uneasy alliance between the sexes; the mysterious, often obsessive, impulses that drive them; the conflicted realities of marriage; the quest for independence in a society that marginalizes the individual.
Lessing is a master of the modern short story. In such seminal stories as "To Room Nineteen," "One off the Short List," and "The Habit of Loving," Doris Lessing has carved a position for herself as the passionate chronicler of the conflicts and arbitrariness of modern life. Like A Man and Two Women (1963) and The Temptation of Jack Orkney (1972), this latest collection explores our often-thwarted impulses for identity and security. The best stories here, full of Lessing's psychological acuity and keen powers of social observation, first appeared in the New Yorker or
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