SATAN, HAVE PITY

A wholly feminine and sometimes embarrassingly female recitatif covers the year in which the seemingly happy wife of a press agent and mother of three glowing boys, loses a fourth child which is on the way, precipitating her downward spirial into a depression. Although ambulatory most of the time and there is the turbulence and of the first phase when images, memories, dreams or rather nightmares fuse. Her sessions with her analyst reveal much she has concealed about her childhood and her joyless marriage. Then there is the comeback when the drive, formerly death directed, becomes indiscriminately sexual ending in an unfortunate episode with their oldest and closest friend, a motion picture star on the skids in another way. Simultaneously, and rather unconvincingly, there is the parallel story of the completely lasane Matty Alkins whose threats begin with pornographic letters and extend to murder... The first person the intimacy with which this is handled but candor need not necessarily with sincerity. ""On my long drawn pain"" completes the quotation from which the title is derived and one can suspect the sweet uses or abuses of adversity.