RAW SILK

by Janet Burroway ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 1977

An audit of experience, personalized, interiorized to a degree, and recognizable at all times. How readily we respond to Virginia Marbalestier during this three-year period of reassessment and revision. Virginia, brought up in a California trailer, finds herself living in a modern Tudor manor after ten years of marriage to Oliver, a British scientist-turned-industrialist in a textile firm. It has taken her until now to realize that the whimsically attractive Oliver has a closed mind and narrow heart and that the earlier years of ""bitching and battering"" have become ""maturer forms of enmity."" Submissive Virginia admits that he is imposing values she doesn't want when their only child is sent away to school to be as proper as its uniform. Their troubles continue when Oliver disapproves of her attempt to help Frances, a very disturbed young woman, in the firm where they all work--Virginia as a creative designer. Actually Frances is beyond help. Closing in on her is the harsh truth and the novel's text that ""All anybody ever has is work and love. And neither of them is a bargain. Love gives it to you all at once, for free, and then afterward it makes you pay, and pay. Work takes extravagant down payments in advance, and then gives you a little gumball of satisfaction."" The little gumball is what Virginia settles for after a trip to mechanized, modernized Japan when she runs off into the mountains in a state of funk and inanition. . . . From the Sixties Janet Burroway has been an acute observer. Raw Silk is her most appealing novel to date, permitting places and people to interact while gentling experience--all of it buffed with sympathetic insights as well as feelings.

Pub Date: March 3, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION