Book Review : A Senior Superwoman Tries Political Fast Track

The Immigrant’s Daughter by Howard Fast (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95)

For half a century, Fast’s novels, histories and biographies have appeared at frequent intervals, a moveable feast with a distinct political flavor. Though time has tempered the dialectic, a Fast book without a crusader is virtually unthinkable. While Barbara Lavette, the central character in “The Immigrant’s Daughter,” is neither Tom Paine nor Spartacus, she’s clearly on the side of the angels; a senior superwoman, beautiful, brave and just.

Just after her 60th birthday, she embarks upon her second congressional campaign from San Francisco’s 48th District, attempting to unseat the incumbent Republican. Her part of the city not only includes the bay-front mansions where, in more frivolous days, she had dined and danced, played tennis and swam, but also encompasses a band of newer tract houses, surrounded in turn by a barrio “to house the servants,” and on the far edge of that section, the homes of the black community. In these outlying areas, the streets are unpaved, the children left alone while their mothers commute to jobs within the inner circle. Despite the volatile and varied economic mix in the 48th, the district remains predominantly Republican, a fact explained by the reluctance of anyone beyond the second residential ring to vote.

Formidable Opponent

In the early ‘70s, Lavette had briefly succeeded in shaking that complacency, though not enough to dislodge her scurrilous opponent, a man about to be indicted for sundry indiscretions in office. This time, she’s facing a far more appealing incumbent, a once liberal Republican who had opposed the Vietnam war almost as fervently as she, but who has now veered to the extreme right. Handsome, respected and subtle, Alexander Holt presents formidable competition. As an attorney, he has learned to manipulate a jury’s fears, and what is the electorate but a larger jury?

Holt’s feelings against legal abortion are so intense he advocates the withdrawal of foreign aid from sovereign nations allowing it. He would virtually end all immigration to the United States, and has strongly urged that federal lands be made available for development by private industry. To a woman of Lavette’s feminist and liberal convictions, an immigrant’s daughter herself, Holt’s ideology is anathema.

Because this is the fifth volume of the Lavette saga, characters from the preceding books tend to drop in and out, some briefly introduced, others behaving as if the reader had known them for years, which is often the case. They’re an assorted and attractive lot, representing San Francisco in all its ethnic and social variety. In general, the Lavette children, grandchildren, in-laws, cousins and friends are supportive and admiring, though sometimes reluctant to see their elegant and beloved Barbara involved in a rough, exhausting and dubious battle. Though these pushes and pulls form the narrative core of the book, the subplots are so complex that the entire cast is kept constantly on stage, their tangled emotional lives demanding a sizeable share of the busy candidate’s attention.

A Busy Heroine

When she’s not walking through her district like a peripatetic Statue of Liberty, reaching out to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Barbara Lavette is sorting out her large family’s baroque romantic problems. In her spare time, she must fend off the sexual advances of her ex-husband as well as those of her distinguished opponent, Holt, who attempts to seduce her into abandoning her congressional aspirations.

When at last she is defeated by Holt after a close race, she persuades her ex-husband to send her to El Salvador as a correspondent for his newspaper. Those familiar with the earlier books will know Lavette as a novelist and screenwriter, well-qualified for this assignment. Though the Central American turmoil is still in its early days, there are palpable indications of the death, destruction and terror to come; more than enough evidence to rekindle the heroine’s political passions. Upon her return to San Francisco, she vows to concentrate upon the ban-the-bomb movement, the supreme crusade of our century and one remarkably suited to the multiple talents of the heroine and her author.

Functional and efficient, Fast’s prose is a machine in which plot and ideals mesh, turn and clash. The reader is constantly being instructed, but the manner is so disarming and the hectic activity so absorbing that the didacticism seldom intrudes upon the entertainment.