THE PHAEDRA COMPLEX

by Jeanette Eyerly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1971

Roll over, Euripedes, and make room for Laura whose parents conceived her sans benefit of clergy (""'I wouldn't have married him at all,' my mother had said to Topaze Thorne, 'if I hadn't known that Laura was on the way'""). Their divorce is ancient history but there's a new man in the offing: ""I continued to harden my heart. . . . If she did it with my father before she married him, I thought, she might do it with Michael Barrington."" Indeed -- at least on becoming his wife -- although this time we're spared the specifics; if Laura's English teacher at Miss Ivory's (""Millicent Moss was like her name. Soft, and always dressed in green"") wasn't off on a Greek kick, we might have been spared the whole retrospection. But the turn of the screw is inexorable (and the execution is even worse than the conception): ""'poor Phaedra' was poor me. . . Michael was Hippolytus and my mother a lady King Theseus -- and the three of us mixed up that Phaedra legend so thoroughly that it took a psychiatrist like Dr. Swerba to recognize it as one of the causes of my mother's illness."" At the sage age of fifteen, Laura also unravels the mystery of love with support from Dartmouth-bound David: ""It meant saying 'no,' not in words but in actions to what so easily could have happened because I needed him so much. . . ."" Miss Eyerly's pot shots make for comic relief -- unintentionally, to be sure -- as the treadmill revolves and the drama devolves to the cheapest kind of tragedy, which is bathos.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: FICTION