Volume 9, Number 3 · August 24, 1967
Total Recall
By Bernard Bergonzi
Casualties of Peace
by Edna O'Brien
Simon & Schuster, 175 pp., $4.50
Digging Out
by Anne Richardson
McGraw-Hill, 181 pp., $4.50
Green Lights Are Blue
by Ursule Molinaro
New American Library, 184 pp., $4.50
Goodbye
by William Sansom
New American Library, 253 pp., $5.50
The unfavorable reviewers of Edna O'Brien's last novel, August Is a Wicked Month, were subjected to a counter-attack which asserted that they were blinkered and mean-spirited males, unable to take the full implications of female emancipation, and openly quaking before any frank assertion of the sexual nature of women. The tired old argument about women does, I think, suggest a way of looking at Miss O'Brien's new and also very bad novel. One position is the traditional one, advanced by most men and quite a few women, that the difference is deeply biological; Freud expressed it when he wrote that 'woman's anatomy is her destiny.' At the opposite pole is the idea that 'femininity' is solely the result of acculturation, as in Simone de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born but becomes a woman.'
Review, 2079 words
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