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magazine page: NEWS, FEBRUARY 17, 1968 File:Upper body of seated woman with hands folded caption: Simone de Beauvoir hand-written comment: EARLIE FRANKIE GIGGI'S OLD LADY?

hand-written above article title Some arthur! SOME PROBLEMS!!

Problems of the affluent age: A novel that offers no answers LES BELLES IMAGES, by Simone de Beauvoir (Putnam, $4.95). By Hayden Carruth The problem of the female writer is not the simple, open-and-shut (shall we say?) struggle with males that it was once made out to be. Why, for instance, at any literary cocktail party you attend, is it always the sweetly murderous voice of a female that rises to impugn the intelligence, motives, and ancestry of Simone de Beauvoir? Or of Mary McCarthy, Denise Levertov, or any of half a dozen others? Obviously, the pressures on them are multiplex.

   Nowadays our thoughts palpitate with problems of injustice.  Good enough; we can demand no less of ourselves.  Nor is the plight of intelligent women as acute as some others that occupy us.  But is it not more chronic?  It has been going on since the beginning of time.  It probably started in heaven.
   We don't even know what to call them.  "Female writer," "lady novelist," "[poetess" -- all stupid terms.
    SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR is as aware of this as anyone.  Indeed, she has discussed it at length in her famous book about women, "The Second Sex."  Yet she herself has failed to avoid the pitfalls, the pressures.  As a novelist she is certainly intelligent; she is skillful, sensitive, and more; and in the past she has produced big novels, like "The Mandarins," that have contained extremely fine writing.  But they  have been forced too awkwardly intense.  In them Mme. de Beauvoir has appeared to be trying too hard; a quite understandable response to the pressures exerted upon her.  
  Now she is 60 years old, though that is hard to believe, and in her new book she has taken the opposite tack:  she has produced a small, cool novel entitled, in both the English and French versions, "Les Belles Images."\   It is a story of the affluent society of the 1960s, the jet set.  It happens to concern the society of Paris, bu in our world today there isn't much difference, at this level anyway, between Paris and Rome and New York and Chicago--or any big  western city.  Strange though it may be, and significant as well, to see the French writing about themselves in terms we Americans use for our own society, this is exactly what we find in "Les Belles Images."  the heroine, named Laurence (and what might one say about that?), is a young woman who possesses a husband, two daughters, a lover, and a high-priced job in an advertising agency.  Her parents, representing the older, war-time generation, are divorced:  the mother living with italicized: her lover, the father in old-fashioned solitude.
   LAURENCE IS SURROUNDED, in short, by affluence:  beautiful modern dwellings, rich modern decor, expensive cars, expensive clothes, expensive parties; her life unfolds in an environment of glossy materialism, like the pictures  in fashionable magazines--italicized:  les belles images.
   Even so, here affairs go far from smoothly.  First, she is tired of her lover, though he is not at all tired of her, and she must find a convenient way to ditch him.  Second, her mother, undergoing the reverse crisis, has been jilted by her lover, and is threatening to break down.  Third, one of the children is heading toward the psychiatrist's office.  Fourth, Laurence and her husband are living on the unsatisfactory plane of successive mild quarrels and half-hearted reconciliation which characterizes stereotyped modernism; that is to say, Laurence is suffering from spiritual deracination, and she knows it.  Fifth, the one person with whom she would like to establish a genuine relationship, her father, the representative of old-fashioned humanism, remains insensitive to her predicament.  Sixth, Laurence is a woman; she is a successful professional woman, a victor in the sexual competition; but her triumph only makes her recognize that she has won it in a filthy business--advertising--and that it has robbed her of the one thing in life a woman ought to have, a close association with the children she has borne.
   In the end Laurence suffers a sort of a breakdown, during which she discovers a sort of an answer.  But we are unconvinced.
   MME. DE BEAUVOIR has set herself, in this novel, a conventionally difficult problem.  How do you write about uninteresting people, who nevertheless control society and hence are important in an interesting way?  The usual answer is that you write satirically, and in the past this is what Mme. de Beauvoir has done.  But now her caustic pen has been blunted by her fundamental sympathy for her dull people.  The dullness is not their fault, she says, and their predicament is a historical tragedy to which we have no ready solution.  Consequently, even though her book contains many shrewd insights ad some passages of dramatic interest, it is on the whole rather wooden.
    And, like most problem novels rather pat.  The millionaire manufacturer, the proletarian girl, the hedonist, the existentialist, the humanist, and then, sure enough, before the book is half-way through,  up turns the cabinet minister--like in all French novels.  Convention delegates, wearing the tags that tell who they are and what they stand for.  they come and go, and speak their set speeches, and all the narrative skill of Simone de Beauvoir, which is a good deal, cannot disguise their thematism.
   WELL, WOODEN AND PAT:  that's a Frenchman for you, and we can't blame it on Simone de Beauvoir.  Even in the novels of Genet and Celine, people talk like art critics.  Life in Paris is a continuous struggle for hauteur;  everyone knows that.  Yet if we can smile at this, and if we can accept the limits that are imposed on  the book by its essayistic function, "Les Belles Images" is well worth reading.  In its way, it is a frightening book.
    What can save Laurence?  Nothing.  she may come to understand the world of glittering surfaces that she has inherited;  indeed as an ad-writer she is better equipped than most of us to see through its flim-flam; but no amount of understanding will permit her to break out.  In order to re-establish contact with real human values she  would have to be born again, someone else altogether, living in a different place.  What lies unspoken at the center of this novel, unspoken but inescapable, is the suspicion that the future of Laurence and her fellow Parisians is being prepared, not in Paris, but in Phnom Penh, Khartoum, Kampala.  And what about Londoners?  New Yorkers?  Chicagoans?  The seed has ripened that was sown for so long.  A wild harvest is coming.

Italicized Hayden Carruth is a widely known poet, novelist and literary critic. A former Chicagoan, he lives with his wife and son on a Vermont farm. line drawn to Hayden connecting to a hand-written comment Really J. S. Balch nee Travers