Book Review : ‘Eva Hathaway’ Runs Full Throttle, Goes Nowhere

The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway by Janice Weber (Fine: $16.95)

To be taken into “The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway” is like being taken down to the engine room of one of those cream-colored cruise ships that do the Caribbean in seven days, with stops for shopping. It is all pistons, pumps, hissing steam and oily discharges.

Janice Weber, seemingly a disciple of Erica Jong, writes a similarly unstable combination of froth and raunchiness. She has a heroine who is a Paula Bunyan of the appetites, and who speaks in the Jongian mode of impermeable narrative. A narrative, that is, that narrates nothing but the narrator; and does it with such voracity that nothing and nobody else has a prayer. Hathaway wields monologue like a tornado, drawing the scenery up into itself.

Except for her sexual appetite, Hathaway resembles one of those rich children who invite friends over so they can see her room, her dolls, her dresses and her jewel box, and listen to her tell them about her family, a boy who smiled at her and the weekends she spends sailing. It’s all, firmly, her view.

Eva does seem to have it all ways. She is rich, writes immensely successful church music, drives a BMW, which she calls “The Bavaria,” lives in a fabulously gentry-style Boston neighborhood, has a husband with an electronics empire, two artistic men who worship her, and a splashy homosexual confidant. Her husband is too busy to pay much attention to her--the fire in his loins, she tells us, was “more like a pilot light”--but by Page 47, she has brought home Fox, a composer who works out at the local YMCA.

The Beginning of the Affair

“Those eyes would be my undoing! He caught my hand at the foot of the staircase. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered.” By Page 48, they are upstairs in bed. Not until Page 382, though, does she leave her husband and run off to join Fox, who has moved to New York.

The intervening space is taken up by Eva’s fervid encounters with Fox, with her unsatisfactory efforts to communicate with her husband, and with a good deal of wavering. Why she hesitates is not altogether apparent; the book makes locomotion clearer than emotion. But she claims to have religious scruples and pangs of conscience.

There is not a great deal of other action taking place: a chilly dinner or two with her husband’s Yankee parents, a certain amount of late-night composing, a lavish party for which she and the confidant cook up a storm of canapes, a visit to her loony mother.

The brassy, tart-tongued monologue tends to render all characters and all feelings in one single, undifferentiated way. We know about Eva’s husband, lover, friends and relatives almost exclusively in terms of how they make Eva feel. She could be showing you her dogs, her cats and her parakeets.

Sometimes the monologue makes a witty point. Eva, who is a New Yorker, is particularly down on Boston, which she finds disorganized, unpredictable and rough. The signs for traffic exits, she points out accurately, tend to be “300 feet down the exit ramp.”

Making Eva’s Day

On the other hand, there is something perilously revealing about her complaint that telling a Bostonian to put out his cigarette is likely to get you a cigarette in your eye. Eva seems precisely the type whose day is made by telling other people to put their cigarettes out.

Sex is the piece de resistance, of course, and quite resistible too. It is set forth in great physical detail. Hathaway talks the girls’ locker room equivalent of a boys’ locker room blue streak. Anatomy and its activities get full treatment. At one climactic moment, there is a startling culinary image that could put the reader off of either sex or sausages for some time to come.

The book’s title overstates its intellectual and emotional appeal. “The Secretions of Eva Hathaway” would be more accurate.