THE MAGICIAN'S GIRL

by Doris Grumbach ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 1986

A lopingly patchworked novel that follows the lives of three intellectual women, beginning with their girlhoods (in the 1920's), continuing to their friendship as a trio of classmates at Barnard College, and going on to the successes (and tragedies) of their adult lives. As in The Missing Person (based loosely on the life of Marilyn Monroe), Grumbach flirts again with the veiled devices of the roman á clef, as if tantalizing the reader with glimpses of the famous. Of the poet, historian, and photographer here, two will be dead by book's end. First of these will be Maud Noon, brilliant but despairing poet and mother of two young children; she will kill herself, Plath-like, by putting her head in an oven (her poetic mentor at Barnard, one Otto Mile, will already have ended up, Pound-like, a patient in St. Elizabeth's in Washington). Minna Grant's life will be longer, allowing her to achieve success as an academic and historian; at age 60, though, after losing her son by suicide, leaving her kindly but cool doctor-husband, and having an affair with a student, she is to be killed--rather gratuitously--by a car in a snowy Iowa City parking lot. This leaves only Elizabeth Becker, famed photographer á la Diane Arbus (she photographs cases of giantism and other anomalies), whose longtime lesbian lover, though, is dying slowly of cancer. These sometimes clichÉd adult lives (""They slept together tenderly, like orphans of the storm who had curled into each other for warmth"") may in truth hold less vital an interest than the more crisply rendered narratives of childhood that precede them: the loneliness of Maud Noon's early life, her brother's death by polio, her mother's perverse infatuation with the Miss America pageant; Minna Grant's overly protective Irish-immigrant mother; and Liz Becker's unhygienic but principled parents, Union Square left-wingers in the age of Sacco and Vanzetti. Effortful work in the follow-three-lives genre, but marred by simplifying shortcuts and worn conventions.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1986

ISBN: 1615606599

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION