Books in Brief: The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl

The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl, by Brigid Brophy (Atlantic/Little, Brown, 224 pp., $7.95). Yearning to imitate the British wits of eighty years ago, Brigid Brophy imitates only eighty-year-old witticisms. She devotes several pages, for instance, to the story of a girl who, given three wishes by a djinnee (Brophy’s spelling), wishes for as many wishes as she wants. Miss Brophy does nothing more with the situation and is evidently unaware that every schoolchild has already pondered this conundrum. In short, the book is rarely rewarding, amusing, or even intelligent. The best piece, “A Literary History,” argues that after the mordant American satirist Ambrose Bierce disappeared in 1913, he went to South America, eventually to reappear as Jorge Luis Borges. Nearly approximating Bierce and Borges in tone, this essay is a pastiche of some quality. Generally, however, Miss Brophy deals with ideas, which become extremely brittle in her hands. Though slavishly imitative of Shaw, she hasn’t learned a thing from him; she always levels her lance at straw men, scarecrow effigies that have little relation to reality. The title piece, which takes half the book, is a tedious, unreadable symposium whose members include such notables as God, Shaw, and Voltaire. According to the dustjacket, the others “wittily advise a bewildered God how best to establish proof of the peculiar nature of His existence.” God’s nature is peculiar only because Brophy has no gift for characterization at all. Here the straw man is an arrogant second banana named the Humble Christian. If Brophy had had the guts to let John Bunyan’s Christian into her book, he would have swept the floor with her whole pack of sophomore debaters.