The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s WomanBy John Fowles Little, Brown, $7.95 Nine years ago there appeared an excellent novel called The Gouffé Case by the German Joachim Maass. When I tried to buy a copy of it for a friend a few years ago, I discovered that it is out of print, and that, indeed, it seems to have dropped into that special oblivion reserved for first-rate books which for one reason or another—a crabby review, alarm at the publishers’ because of slow sales, the vicious taste and thin education of the reading public—fall short of catching on. Its indifferent treatment is perhaps due to its being very European, even though the most scalp-chilling parts of The Gouffé Case are set in Saratoga and Arizona. Mr. Maass’ strange novel is another—perhaps the best—episode in the adventures of Lulu, a woman of rending perversity whose charms are ineluctable, lethal, and worse.

As a constant in the imagination she can be traced back to the Hittites, but as a demonized version of the female will in our time she makes her grand appearance in the plays of Frank Wedekind—Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (1864-1918)—where she figures as a kind of female spider. In Der Erdgeist (1895) she arrives just in time to join the Gorgons and Circes who were beginning to haunt the canvasses of Klimt and the pages of Freud. In Die Büchse der Pandora (1903) her career of seduction and gore is ended by Jack the Ripper. In Mr. Maass’ novel she is back in business in a big way, as mysteriously beautiful as any heroine of Poe’s, and as spooky. The mischievous Mr. Nabokov created her diminutive in the fetching Lolita. And now John Fowles gives us Lulu in a Victorian embodiment, nothing lacking in her sneaky charm.

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Guy Davenport

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The French Lieutenant’s WomanBy John Fowles Little, Brown, $7.95 Nine years ago there appeared an excellent novel called The Gouffé Case by the German Joachim Maass. When I tried to buy a copy of it for a friend a few years ago, I discovered that it is out of print, and that, indeed, it seems to have dropped into that special oblivion reserved for first-rate books which for one reason or another—a crabby review, alarm at the publishers’ because of slow sales, the vicious taste and thin education of the reading public—fall short of catching on. Its indifferent treatment is perhaps due to its being very European, even though the most scalp-chilling parts of The Gouffé Case are set in Saratoga and Arizona. Mr. Maass’ strange novel is another—perhaps the best—episode in the adventures of Lulu, a woman of rending perversity whose charms are ineluctable, lethal, and worse.

As a constant in the imagination she can be traced back to the Hittites, but as a demonized version of the female will in our time she makes her grand appearance in the plays of Frank Wedekind—Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (1864-1918)—where she figures as a kind of female spider. In Der Erdgeist (1895) she arrives just in time to join the Gorgons and Circes who were beginning to haunt the canvasses of Klimt and the pages of Freud. In Die Büchse der Pandora (1903) her career of seduction and gore is ended by Jack the Ripper. In Mr. Maass’ novel she is back in business in a big way, as mysteriously beautiful as any heroine of Poe’s, and as spooky. The mischievous Mr. Nabokov created her diminutive in the fetching Lolita. And now John Fowles gives us Lulu in a Victorian embodiment, nothing lacking in her sneaky charm.