Volume 6, Number 2 · February 17, 1966
Divorce American Style
By Christopher Lasch
The Complete Guide to Divorce
by Samuel G. Kling
Bernard Geis, 298 pp., $6.95
Your Marriage and the Law
by Harriet F. Pilpel, by Theodora Zavin
Collier Books, 333 pp., $.95
Wives' Legal Rights
by Richard T. Gallen
Dell Purse Books, 64 pp., $.25
The Road to Reno: A History of Divorce in the United States
by Nelson Manfred Blake
Macmillan, 262 pp., $5.95
Divorce is a depressing subject from almost any point of view. For participants, it is not likely to be an ennobling experience; nor does it have the compensatory virtue, like other forms of suffering, of lending itself to literary uses. Artistically divorce is a disaster, combining the maximum of pain with the minimum of dignity—not exactly the ingredients of tragedy. The subject might have comic possibilities, in the hands of a writer with a talent for the bizarre. Such talents, however, are not the kind usually attracted to the subject. The accepted way of writing about divorce, for novelists and scholars alike, is to adopt at the outset the grim earnestness considered appropriate to discussions of important but somewhat marginal social 'questions'—venereal disease, illegitimate births, and the like. Divorce, like these other issues, belongs by literary and scholarly convention to the category of questions to which readers have to be urged, implicitly or explicitly, to 'face up.' Because divorce has never securely established itself as a subject of serious inquiry, tinged as it is with sensationalism, a serious writer dealing with the subject has to expend most of his energy trying to establish his seriousness: a dreary business, not very conducive to flights of the imagination.
Review, 3105 words
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