Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing

Abstract

> I z I H D I H < I Q I ^1 o I of firewood"; the moral dilemma of those, including child soldiers, whom poverty and lies drive tokill their own people; the suffering of women; the courage and humanity of aid workers and journalistswho risk theirlives to "get the storyout"; the inaction of Western govern ments. But one also recalls the sense of communitywithin both small vil lages and huge refugee camps, the strength of women who, "though . . . victimized, emerge more heroes thanvictims," and thedignity of all who suffer within thesepages. The UN Declaration ofHuman Rights follows Hari's acknowledg ments, in which he asserts that tak ing risks for news stories means nothing "unless the people who read them will act." Hari thus chal lenges us to respond to the suffering engendered by ethnic cleansing and genocide. Michele Levy North CarolinaA&T University Doris Lessing. Alfred and Emily. New York. HarperCollins. 2008. viii + 274 pages, ill. $25.95. isbn 978-0-06 083488-3 If itwere proper for her parents' generation, or her own, Doris Less ingmight well have titledher book Emily andAlfred?or justEmily. What the author seeks is another woman in her mother, someone other than the oppressive parent who battled endlessly with her daughter, some one other than the mother portrayed in Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954). Lessing's mother is most redeemed in thenovella that forms the firsthalf of this book. In her mother's (Emily McVeagh's) fic tional life, she doesn't mis-marry Lessing's father. Instead, she contin ues the nursing career she took up against her parents' wishes, marries a prominent doctor rather than a convalescent veteran, and founds a system of private schools forpoor children afterhis death. One of the assumptions Less ingmade in creatingher fiction was that World War I did not occur to ruin the lifeof theman, her father, who wanted nothing more than to farm. She is clear-eyed enough to understand that therewould have been wars on a less extensive scale? between theTurks and theSerbs, in other regions?and that a genera tionofyoung people who had never known war would be attracted to serve. But she imagines that some might return convinced that they ought to fund efforts to serve the needs of the impoverished theyhad encountered. In the autobiographical second half, Lessing speaks of her struggle to recover the better woman from the self-pitying,ailing mother who hated farm life.Both parents filled the childrenwith theGreatWar: life in the trenches, life (forhermother) as a nurse in a hospital filledwith the dying. She feels a generation of bright women were trapped in traditional roles by the disruption of thewar. Having lived through a childhood with all that frustrated mother-energy focused on her, hav ing met other women of her inter war generation whose mothers over managed them,Lessing is all forthe bright and pluckywomen being able towork outside thehome. The essays have their own charm, each focused on a slice of Lessing's life in Southern Rhodesia, remembered and sometimes revis ited: her reading as a child, what they ate, how they related to ser vants, how she discovered some thingofhermother's previous social life when shewas permitted to take out dresses in her mother's trunk, her second marriage to Gottfried Lessing, her brother's remembrance of World War II and his activities in Rhodesia's Liberation War. Appropriately, Alfred and Emily endswith a scene Idon't recallbeing in the Martha Quest series:hermoth erhosting and playing songs for the RAF pilots who were waiting for the troopships that would take them home after the war. Having ere ated a fictional life forher mother, it's as if Doris Lessing can now admit something of thepower, hap piness, and achievements of Emily McVeagh back into the real life of EmilyMcVeagh Tayler. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma BaptistUniversity Warren Motte. Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2008. 237 pages. $29.95. isbn 978-1-56478-503-9 Even froma firstglance at the title of Warren Motte's text Fiction Now, many readers and critics may well pause before the elusive term now, for theymay associate itwith the difficulties inherent in attempting to pinpoint the current state of French fiction that remains in a continuous cycle of regeneration. Yet for those who spend too much time contem plating the impossibility indefining the now, theunderlying, polyvalent characteristics of French fiction will remain out of reach and the true import ofMotte's textwill remain undiscovered. However, those who have ques tioned French fiction'spurpose and usefulnesswill continue, eitherout of curiosity?for Motte's title is, in fact, provocative?or out of an attempt to better comprehend the contempo rary French literary scene. For these IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 78 i World Literature Today ^Hjj| ...