ROUGH STRIFE

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 1980

Schwartz's much-anthologized short story of the same name was good, but her debut novel is even better, deepening rather than bloating the original core. Caroline, a newly orphaned graduate student in math in the Fifties, meets Ivan. Both are in Rome, she on vacation, he on a Fulbright in art history. Ivan is a little distant but eventually sexually passionate; Caroline wants experience, and when it comes either too fast or too slow, she's bemused. They marry abroad, come back to the States, and both take academic positions. They do not want children. And under the entropy of two lives that suggest fulfillment but are in reality strained, a gradual apartness develops. Then, when they're 30ish, a baby is conceived--a shock not only to both of them but also to the third party involved: their previous life together, their history. Then there's yet another child, another daughter. Caroline, invited away to be a guest professor, has an affair; it is merely interesting. Women's lib comes along and taps an inchoate anger in her--but that, too, is merely interesting. Her conclusion? ""That she loved him in a way that was appalling, that things about him over which he had little control--ways of seeing and speaking, ways of being--exerted a control over her, she accepted now as a fact of life, neither loathsome nor lovely."" Schwartz's prose can now and then turn fussy and abstract, and Caroline's field--topology--seems like a metaphorical coolie, asked to shoulder more than its own weight. But in certain scenes--Caroline teaching an otherwise self-assured Ivan how to ice skate; the first birth; Ivan heartfeltly reading Wuthering Heights aloud to the children--she achieves a density and tight-knittedness that is as satisfying to the intelligence as it is to the feelings. A very fine first novel.

Pub Date: June 4, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION