LOVE, AGAIN

A probing and provocative examination of the experience of love as the mind and body approach old age, by the eminent British author best known for The Golden Notebook, her classic depiction of woman's fate (which this new novel intermittently evokes and resembles). Sarah Durham is 65, long widowed and freed of most family responsibilities. Yet she's burdened by the needs of her teenaged niece Joyce (whose parents virtually abandon her to Sarah's care), and also handles a demanding job as all-purpose manager (and sometime writer and director) with a thriving London theater. A play in production, Julie Vairon, requires Sarah to research the life and work of its title character, a beautiful quadroon girl from Martinique whom various men loved to distraction and who spent the last years of her brief life in France, where she became an accomplished composer and a famous diarist. The image of this mysterious woman's mingled happiness and despair reawakens in Sarah feelings long suppressed, as do the flirtations of a handsome young actor who joins the play's cast, as well as the more comfortable (though no less erotic) presence of its 35-year-old director, a man irrevocably committed to his family. We feel throughout this absorbing story—told both from Sarah's viewpoint and in its author's confident omniscient voice—the pressure of a preternaturally keen analytical intelligence, making every vividly dramatized scene resonate with judicious commentary. The web of sensation, emotion, and fantasy that all but overpowers Sarah during her reawakening is woven with clarity and force, and when Lessing frankly describes Sarah's sexual rekindling, you almost feel the heat rising off the pages. Lessing is a contemporary George Eliot, an intellectual whose imagination is firmly grounded in the sensual life and the natural world. Love, Again is a triumphant vindication of her literary method.