AN HONEST WOMAN

by Jack Dunphy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 1971

This is one of Jack Dunphy's curious novels which prowls through emotional terrain in a circumambient fashion and is charged by the ties of the blood and the demands of flesh. Mary, the honest woman of the title, is now just past thirty and a survivor of a long, incestuous attachment to her father O'Hare, who acquired great wealth with which he endowed her at his death at the expense of his other children. For Mary was ""the beauty at the end of his life."" The sisters now come to Paris, where Mary has spent the year since his death, ostensibly to retrieve some of the money and to try and determine her involvement with another older man. Actually he has no meaning for her and it will be her pregnancy (after one of those brief encounters with a young man during the student revolt) which will enable her to go on ""living."" This was O'Hare's last directive to her and it will be fulfilled. Peripheral scenes (she is locked up by the possessive mother of her French mother) seem far more difficult to justify than the novel's central relationship which comes across with a certain urgency. Primarily because Mary transcends the experience and remains as inviolable as the concept of love qua love. One accepts it on these terms or not at all.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971

Categories: FICTION