Volume 23, Number 15 · September 30, 1976
The Ladies Vanish
By Michael Wood
The Doctor's Wife
by Brian Moore
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pp., $8.95
Triptych
by Claude Simon, translated by Helen R. Lane
Viking/A Richard Seaver Book, 171 pp., $8.95
Beard's Roman Women
by Anthony Burgess, with photographs by David Robinson
McGraw-Hill, 160 pp., $8.95
Moses: A Narrative
by Anthony Burgess
Stonehill, 192 pp., $8.95
Sheila Redden, thirty-seven years old, married, handsome, tall, self-conscious about her height, well-educated, nursing a sense of past risks and chances not taken, falls in love with an American eleven years younger than herself. After a brief, nervous idyll, she decides she can't go away with him, and can't go back to her husband and her teen-age son, and disappears from all their lives, 'like the man in the newspaper story, the ordinary man who goes down to the corner to buy cigarettes and is never heard from again.' The image is Sheila's own, the best explanation she can offer for her conduct, and her novel ends with her leaving a London park as it closes for the evening, quite alone, her whole past, recent and distant, shaken off: 'She went through the gates and walked off down the street like an ordinary woman on her way to the corner to buy cigarettes.'
Review, 3023 words
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