THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

by Brian Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1976

Brian Moore's unhappy women appear in varying strengths and weaknesses and he has written signally better about them than most men--a recurrent observation. Time will probably never subdue Judith Hearne while Mary Dunne was only retrieved temporarily from her own ineffectuality with momentary insights. But what of the doctor's wife, Sheila Redden of Belfast, just as respectable as her last year's Donald Davies dress? She cannot save herself and Moore does little to amplify her ordinariness. She goes to Paris and Nice on the assumption that her husband will join her but he's detained. Meanwhile with more urgent sex than she has ever known, she has an affair with a much too young American, Tom. Days later she has another kind of nocturnal experience in which she flirts with the void. Although she gave up her faith years ago, she talks with a priest, finally decides that she must be her own state of grace. And so--refusing to go to America with Tom, abandoning her husband and youngster--she summarily turns her back on all that was, isolating herself in a smaller void. Moore, you'll remember, specializes in limbos of one kind or another. But somehow the unarticulated decision of this once sensible, now vagrant woman, lacks conviction particularly since all the other externals belong to the glossier knowns of women's fiction--comparable to Mary Dunne's. It's for those other women who stay home to read rather than wander off like the doctor's wife toward a lonelier uncertainty.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION