Women and 'the enemy in the house'

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THE WOMEN'S ROOM, by Marilyn French; Summit Books, 471 pp., $10.95.

By Alicia Metcalf, Miller

This sprawling novel, fraught with melodrama and a fascinating lack of restraint, is about a woman named Mira who was born in the late 1920s, who became a wife in the 1950s, and whose life, by virtue of divorce and the woman's movement, has changed dramatically by the 1970s.

Around Mira swirl dozens of other characters, mostly women, their lives touching hers over the years. All the women are (or think they are) wronged by men, done in by the convention of marriage, or both. As humorless, as naive and full of blame and self-pity, as long-winded as much of this is, it is nevertheless compulsively readable. For all its flaws, including some inexcusably bad writing, this is an emotionally affecting book.

The story is this:

Mira, good at her studies but not very sophisticated, believes her only choices after college are "marriage or the convent." (I leave it to others to figure this out; the 1950s weren't exactly the dark ages). So she marries Norm, an innocuous medical student, a bit of a prig and a bore. She soon feels that she has "let the enemy into the house." And years later she reflects: "There are many ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her, you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her."

At any rate, Mira plays out a cultural scenario she feels was "written before she was born,' and she has two children whom she uncomplainingly tends while her husband goes off for days to stay at his mother's house where he can study in quiet.

Later, of course, Mira and her doctor husband move out of a cramped apartment into the suburbs, where Mira meets a multitude of variations on her own developing feelings of marital

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discomfort a woman who has taken to drink because of her husband's peccadillos, a sexually promiscuous wife, a woman who goes insane because of the way her husband treats her, etc. Throughout it all, Mira, the dreamer, makes it all somehow livable for herself.

Eventually, she and Norm move to a still bigger house, the children go off to school, and Mira, like someone overdosed on "Hints from Heloise," puts her housekeeping system on file cards and becomes the ideal domestic servant.

But it does not come as much of a shock to the reader when Norm comes home one night and asks for a divorce. Mira falls apart, pulls herself together, puts her boys into a boarding school and goes off, at 38, to enter graduate school at Harvard.

There she meets other women, other variations on the theme a lovely lesbian, a magnetic revolutionary, an endearing basket-case. Also she meets and falls in love with Ben. She does well again in her studies, becomes a little politicalized, goes bra-less. Her life is full and heady until Ben leaves her because she refuses, at 41, to marry him and have his child.

Really, you are thinking, this is ridiculous. And you're right. Yet I must stand and defend this novel, because, for one thing, no one has ever writ-

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ten of women's lives in such a manner and in such full detail. More importantly, no one, in all the recent books about women, has spoken out in quite this way for Mira's generation of women.

Granted all the novel's failures that its men are merely stick figures, that its women are all victims of awful husbands, dreadful fathers or wretched lovers, that it raises many questions and fails to adequately explore the answers-granted all this, the novel is somehow redeemed by the character of Mira.

The structure is such that Mira, telling of past events, can interrupt the narrative from time to time to drag us into her present inconsolable loneliness and solitude. Although Mira is not a terribly attractive. character (she is often little more than a reflector of others' lives, as her name suggests), her hurt is undeniably real.

During those excursions into the present, the melodrama and hysterics fade and the bare substance of her life is revealed. And that life moves

us.

"This is not the world I would have wished," she says toward the end, and there is some glimmer of hope for her, some suggestion that she may come to understand the central theme running through her own long, long narrative: we do not wish our worlds, we make them.

Alicia Metcalf Miller is a freelance reviewer.