ARIABELLA: THE FIRST

by Nina A. Straight ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1980

Memories of an upper-class, cripplingly limited girlhood and adolescence--shrewdly detailed, often amusing material (circa 1945-1960) which, however, remains thin and episodic despite an effortful attempt to provide it with a portentous novelistic frame. That unsuccessful framework: young Mrs. Susannah Glendenning (nÉe Machem) is taking a train-fide back to the Rhode Island seaport manse (now a museum) of her childhood; and on the way she's reading the official report on the recent plane-crash death of her childhood chum, poet Ariabella, examining her own life in the light of this friend's death (""the first""). A neat, potentially resonant blueprint, perhaps--but in the doing, it's nearly disastrous: unconventional Ariabella, who drifts into the narrative only occasionally, remains far too sketchy to serve as alternative-life prototype; the air-crash mystery registers only as a red herring and an excuse for Sarah's meditations on mortality; and the train-ride/soul-journey premise--which culminates in Susannah's decision to break out of her stifling marriage and pursue a charming stranger--never seems anything but a creaky literary convention. Still, out of the flashback-within-flashback format there does emerge a series of sharp, ironically vivid vignettes from Susannah's past, a childhood spent largely not with her alcoholic mother out West, but rather at schools and with her blueblood East-Coast aunts. Susannah's first horse. First kiss. First menstruation (""She felt like a framed bedwetter""). Shopping, surreptitiously and almost flat-chested, for a bra. Miss Farthingale's school--where boys are rated by breeding and looks (Fab, Medium, Icky), where Susannah realizes ""she would rather go naked than not wear a Bonwit label."" College at Penn Lynne (presumably Bryn Mawr), where well-dressed wallflower Susannah is bizarrely obsessed with being a Gentile among Jews. And nuptials at a very young 19--after a hymenotomy (with seven interns observing) and douche lessons from a cousin--which culminate in a monstrous wedding night with insensitive Jed, who tries to heat up the bride with Henry Miller porn and turns into a satyr-rapist. No wonder, then, that soon-mother-of-two Susannah develops homicidal fantasies (""Don't be so silly. What color rug are you using for your hallways?"" says her cousin) and winds up on that life-crisis train. But, though there may be a bona fide tale of repression and growth here, Straight never develops it, choosing instead an oblique, contrived approach that insists, ineffectually, on Ariabella's death as a thematic pivot. Result: a shaky, self-conscious piece of fiction, yet one with considerable comic diversion--and some glimpses into the painful consequences of socio-sexual hobbling--along the way.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION