Book Review

Sheila Niles (30-B-2) FPE

I AM MARY DUNNE, by Brian Moore, Viking, New York, 217 pp, $4.95 (1968).

Attempts by male writers to protray the "women's viewpoint" are, almost inevitably, a by- product of the story-tellers' art except for those rare novels in which the girls are totally absent. While many of the resulting "dolls" are little more than part of the scenery, it is interesting that

so many men have portrayed quite credible women - in the third person. Much rarer is the man who tries to tell a story from the "in- side of his female character, and has the courage to tell it in the first person. His intent is, all too often,poronography, and the success of such books seems to depend largely on male curiosity about how it FEELS to have one of those spectacular female orgasms which the reader can only enjoy by proxy. These books lead from John Cle- land's FANNY HILL to the current series by Rod Gray, THE LADY FROM L.U.S.T., in which the girl is little more than a self-propelled set of sex organs. Such personality as these heroines have is so blatan- tly masculine as to evoke derision from any woman who chances to pick up a copy. Then, rarest of all, is a book like the present one in which a man really and sincerely tries to "think myself into the skin and into the mind of a young, troubled, pretty woman", as Mr. Moore wrote in a statement prepared for the Literary Guild Maga- zine. A measure of his success is the fact that the Guild, a major book club has selected MARY for distribution.

This is not Mr. Moore's first venture into what Deanna

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