Volume 24, Number 14 · September 15, 1977
A Heavy Legacy
By Michael Wood
Edith's Diary
by Patricia Highsmith
Simon and Schuster, 348 pp., $8.95
The Stepdaughter
by Caroline Blackwood
Scribner's, 96 pp., $6.95
We have heard these words, or words like them, in countless movies, novels, songs, and soap operas. They are the refrain of the man walking out, making his second bid for true happiness, leaving the woman stranded in the first and only act of her hampered life. These two particular quotations come, respectively, from Caroline Blackwood's The Stepdaughter and Patricia Highsmith's Edith's Diary, and in both of these books the shabbiness of the man's behavior is underlined by a curious legacy. The man's second chance is actually paid for by the woman, who picks up the pieces of the ruined first chance. The abandoned wife in The Stepdaughter is left not only with her own small child but with her husband's daughter from an earlier marriage: Renata, a fat, helpless thirteen-year-old girl—'She had the pathos of those hopelessly flawed objects which one often sees being put up for sale in junk shops.' The wife in Edith's Diary is left not only with her own sloppy and irresponsible son but with her husband's Uncle George, an old man who refuses to go to a nursing home and who gradually becomes messily incontinent.
Review, 2872 words
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