In The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing has written what she seems to believe is a novel about sex and politics—those two raddling obsessions of the contemporary world. She has instead involved herself in an exposition of that deadliest of sins, acedia, the spiritual boredom of people who have ceased really to care. She believes, also, that she has written a “modern” novel, whereas there is often an old-fashioned, almost quaint, flavor about it—like the waistless dresses and pot hats of the 1920s. True, she uses all the now-mandatory four-letter words, and many of their five-letter cousins. She probes the sexual act with a clinical perceptiveness that is de rigueur these days, and arrives at insights which are interesting and rare in their accuracy. These disquisitions on the mechanics of sexuality and the war between the sexes will be highly educational to those whose ideas of love derive from the romantic posturings of Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. But her attempts to link them to life and politics are a splendid failure. Most of her characters are Communists and semi-ex-Communists—but she writes about the Party as if the last decades of history had never really occurred. For she is back in the era when the welfare-worker mind was seeking desperately to find succor in the Communist movement and to reduce it to the lukewarm tea of Liberal attitudinizing. Her view of America and Americans, moreover, is a non-homogenized blend of pre-war British snobbism and the anti-McCarthy fulminations of the New Statesman.
The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing. Simon and Schuster, $5.95
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