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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.