Book Review : Her Career Was Powered by a Common Quirk Ethic

Maud Gone by Kathleen Rockwell Lawrence (Atheneum: $15.95)

Loving your father is lonely, and being married to a nice, though sometimes errant husband is lonely, and having a baby is lonely. Personal relationships are quite generally lonely. Going to work, on the other hand, can be cheerful and companionable. This is the theme, more or less, of “Maud Gone,” a first novel by Kathleen Lawrence. Its 33-year-old protagonist, who tosses restlessly in a network of emotional connection, eventually finds that, however much braiding and catching she does, the net will not hold her whole weight.

So finally, Maud Devlin relinquishes a net and takes hold of the tossing and turning. With an equally restless neighbor, she designs an insomnia bumper-sticker, goes on to set up an insomnia telephone service; and by the end, she is working on an insomnia newsletter.

In the way of all successful originals she will continue, no doubt, to turn her quirk into her fortune, and branch out into insomnia T-shirts and cookbook.

Neat and Amusing

As a plot, this is neat and amusing. As a theme, it is more neat than provocative. Lawrence’s novel treats its woman’s dilemma lightheartedly, which is better--the dilemma being a venerable one--than treating it somberly. The lightheartedness is sometimes out of sync, though. Maud’s elfin and perceptive sensibility embroiders her problem but doesn’t do much to transform it.

The title is a pun on Yeats’ heroine. It is playful, but I don’t quite see that it is significant. You could strain a point and think of her, like Maud Gonne, choosing a public life over a private one; except that Maud Devlin will probably end up with both; and besides, fad-marketing is not the same as espousing the Irish nation.

Innocent and spunky, Maud was a rebel in the ‘60s, a feminist activist in the ‘70s and now, in the ‘80s and nine months pregnant, she is a baby boomer. She does everything in a crowd; as the author nicely writes, she is “a ripple on the social tide.”

A Portable Ocean

With Jack, her lawyer husband, she attends the birthing clinic run by a lyrical Swedish woman who advises her clients to think of themselves as portable ocean. The Swede gets Jack to pinch her to demonstrate that pain is an illusion. Such an illusion it proves, that he sleeps with her and comes home drunk.

When she is angry at men, Maud imagines them as baboons. Now she imagines whole herds of copulating mandrills, kicks her husband in a sensitive place, and flees to the apartment of Joanna, an old schoolmate. Before long, the bullying doctor has delivered the baby, and Maud spends the next couple of months taking care of her alone, except for sporadic help from Joanna, who is flighty.

Lawrence renders the hell of 24-hour baby care with real vividness. It is combat duty, complete with battle fatigue; and Maud, sleepless and slouching about in an old nightgown, could be a Battle of the other Bulge G.I., with tattered boots, a uniform caked with mud and a 14-day growth of beard.

Kindly Abstraction

Near a breakdown, she retreats to stay with her father, a small-town doctor. He had gone briefly mad when his wife died--he imagined himself to be a character in the Beatrix Potter tales--and recovered to live in a kindly abstraction. “He’d had a family and now he had a word processor,” Maud reflects. There is no real home back home; nor, after Jack makes up with her and takes her back, is there more than partial solace with him.

A woman’s place is starting an insomnia business. Instead of making a laboratory of your relationship, go out and get your hands dirty. Fair enough, but hardly startling. The book’s concluding section is fast and brittle and glib.

The characters who surround Maud are meant to be agreeably odd, but the author creates eccentricities rather than eccentrics. Joanna cuts a swath through her Catholic school by successively seducing the four priests sent to lead the annual retreat. Her boyfriend is initially mistaken for a black pimp; in fact he is a stock analyst who simply likes to dress flashy but who spends his money helping his fellow Haitian refugees. Jack wins a job with a fashionable law firm after successfully suing New York for its dog-befouled sidewalks, and thus providing the initiative for the city’s Pooper-Scooper law.

As for Maud, her musings and misadventures possess considerable beguilement. Her spirit is winning and her predicaments are real. It is only a pity that Lawrence, in the obvious delight she takes in her protagonist, tends to push humor into winsome mess.