Book Review : Mother, Son and Lovers in the Dregs of the Sexual Revolution

A Girl of Forty by Herbert Gold (Donald I. Fine: $16.95)

San Francisco may not seem a logical setting for a war novel, nor is a sexy blond public relations lady your usual battle-scarred veteran, but despite appearances, “A Girl of Forty” is a report from the front lines of the sexual revolution. Ten years later, the casualty figures continue to rise and the due bills remain unpaid.

Though intact is hardly the word for Suki Read, she seems to be on the winning side when Frank Curtis first spies her “Across the room at a St. Valentine’s Day party at the Old Spaghetti Factory & Cafe.” A few witticisms later, they’re in the bed temporarily vacated by Suki’s “main man,” an architect and city planner away on a business trip. We know we’re in the recent past because Reagan isn’t yet President and people like Suki and her current lover have an “open relationship”--fidelity with a 200-mile radius. The new celibacy is at least five years away.

While Frank quickly realizes that Suki lacks some essential human quality, it’s nothing he can’t do without. Instead of brooding, he rationalizes: “There seemed to be a fastener missing. I guessed she was put together with Velcro, not with blood, lymph, sinew, a past and griefs, a future and hopes, a heart . . . but how foolish not to be content with something so spicy-smelling, eager, delighted, frank, open and eager to be of use to itself.”

In that rosy dawn of the sexual revolution, Suki is clearly a commissar, generously extending her favors to men like Frank, decent but plodding types who never stood a chance under the old regime. Suki is a divorcee with a beautiful 15-year-old son, an apparently well-adjusted child who stays in the garage tinkering with bicycles whenever his mother signals by drawing the draperies. Suki and Peter “respect each other’s privacy,” enjoying a junior version of the arrangement Suki has with her various lovers. In the pseudo-sophisticated circles in which these characters rotate, such deals are commonplace.

The passionate connection between Suki and Frank cools to friendship after a year or so, though they continue to meet for coffee, sex or supper, as the mood strikes them. Suki always transforms her lovers into companions, introducing them to one another at lively parties in her charming Cow Hollow house; like good hostesses everywhere, she knows people enjoy meeting others with mutual interests. The former lovers form a sort of alumni club--loyal to Suki and to the rest of the old boys.

An Odd Adolescence

Successors come and go, but Frank and Suki stay in touch and on one of these occasions, Frank is alarmed to see how much Peter’s sunny personality has changed in two years. Not only has Suki’s sweetly obliging son turned into a calculating and manipulative 17-year-old, he seems to be considering sexual identities as if such matters were options to be selected from a menu. “No, he was not a normal boy who was not yet sure if he wanted to make love with men or women. He was a boy who was sure he wanted to be as successful with men as his mother was.” In this post-revolutionary world, such confusion is only to be expected, but Peter seems to have crossed a dangerous invisible line.

As Frank suspects, that desire will have dire results, though nothing in this glib novel prepares us for the Grand Guignol finale. In the course of the abrupt transition from entertainment to horror story, we’re introduced to an assortment of familiar late 20th-Century types--a radical feminist psychiatrist, a black detective who hides his shrewdness under a country-boy accent, a teen-age punk, a retired flight attendant-turned-stress counselor--amusing characters entirely unequal to the demands Gold makes upon them.

Suki, whose morals can be summed up by “if it feels good, do it,” is given a punishment fit for an archvillain, while obliging but opportunistic Frank must turn into a philosopher. Since neither is equipped for their roles, they’re unconvincing in them.

“A Girl of Forty” is a modern cautionary tale, ending with a couple of disillusioned revolutionaries realizing that life may have been better under the moral czars.