Book Review : Slice of Anguish Sets Tone in ‘Intimacy’

Intimacy by Susan Chace (Random House: $14.95; 176 pages)

In the first nine pages of “Intimacy,” Susan Chace has constructed a quivering sliver of modern urban anguish. It is a powerfully miniaturized affair, an Angst microchip. In a few years, the Japanese will have a technological lead on such things, and we will be turning them out under license.

For the time being, the United States has a comfortable market share. Ann Beatty, Joan Didion and Bette Pesetsky are among the many writers who have perfected the device. It assembles, in seemingly random simultaneity, a set of neural discharges variously registering a real calamity, a heartbreak, a minor domestic disaster, an inconvenience or two, a nervous child, air pollution and some jarring recollection from the past.

It is democratic and leveling. The narrator or protagonist experiences an external disaster in the same range as the memory of a humiliation at age 8. A remembered suicide attempt is the emotional equivalent of an intractable window-leak. The significance of our traditional tragedies is reduced to that of a broken garbage bag; conversely, a broken garbage bag can signal the ruin of our lives.

As I say, a powerful gadget. Here, in “Intimacy,” is Cecilia’s:

She has just stormed out of a family meal in her apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. Present at the table are her second husband, Mark, a tolerant, mildly affectionate and abstracted journalist; Addy, their winning and precocious 2-year-old daughter; and Daniel, her 16-year-old son by her first husband.

‘A Kind of Green Glow’

Daniel has recently been returned by husband No. 1 after 10 years’ custody, with a note figuratively pinned to his figurative basket: “Your son won’t go to high school.” He is druggy, his hair is dyed yellow and pink, he watches rock video at 4 a.m., the volume turned all the way down. “There’s a kind of green glow in the living room at that hour,” Cecilia notes, lying wide awake in bed.

Daniel neither sleeps nor goes to school, but when he refuses to eat the vegetarian meal Cecilia has made for him, she goes out for air. And gets mugged.

Later, when her checkbook is recovered from a garbage can, she will observe, or think of, the following: a poem by Robert Lowell, water-smeared, inside the checkbook; a recollection that Lowell’s wife, Jean Stafford, claimed to know the story behind every word he’d written.

Stafford was suffering a breakdown; we get an inkling of Cecilia’s own breakdown and suicide attempt years earlier. She recalls her own Stafford-like and unsuccessful appeal to a divorce court for Daniel’s custody: She knew him through and through.

We hear Daniel’s present effect on her: “Something out of Magritte--detached, sudden--and solid with warning.” We get her reflection that stickup men no longer say: “This is a stickup.”

On the Urban Edge

In nine pages, it is a biography and present account of a modern, privileged woman--she, like her husband, is a successful journalist--on the urban edge. The compression is astonishing; the writing, though suffering a tinge or two of chic, is artful:

“The knife at my throat curves ever so slightly. It is shinier than it could really have been. The voice, more gentle: ‘Excuse me. Don’t scream. Just give me your pocketbook.’ Only the fingers stay true, the touch of a jazz player, shaky, but secure on his turf. In an instant, he has slit the straps off my shoulder. My handbag hangs from his wrist.”

The rest of the book, however, begins on the 10th page. The admirable microchip is called upon to work something. That something is largely a mix of therapeutic case history and biographical-confessional-analytical pieces of the kind that the New York Times--Cecilia’s husband works there and so, for awhile, did Susan Chace’s--used to run weekly in its “Hers” column.

The life, the anxieties, the torments that glitter in the microchip are developed as graceful commonplaces in the succeeding chapters. There is Cecilia’s Catholic girlhood, marked by worry that a Jewish father will fail to make it to heaven, and by envy of a dead sister who presumably got there without penance or red tape.

Affairs Everywhere

There is her restless first marriage to a doctor, and their life in a 1960’s rural poverty program in Arizona; her affair with the doctor’s brother; the brother’s affair with her sister. There is another affair with a television soundman when she was working in the press detachment of a presidential campaign.

There is her breakdown and suicide attempt, a bleak confrontation with her mother, and an account of her flabby second marriage, which ends in separation after Mark unaccountably beats her up on the eve of an assignment to Paris.

Perhaps Mark is suffering a breakdown of his own; we are not told. Like a counseling session, like many of those “Hers” columns, there is only one sensibility present: the narrator’s. Mark, Daniel, Addy--too cute and precocious to matter to anyone except the admissions office of the private school she’s clearly bound for--exist only as the weather does; that is, as a factor in the way Cecilia feels.

At the end, she feels strong, and good about herself. We might share her battered satisfaction, if we had ever met the “herself.” All we have met are the feelings of this civilized, literate and solipsistic narrator.

In fiction, as in life, people who sit down and tell you all about themselves are apt to disappear as soon as they stop talking, and to remain unknown. We know about a woman seen gesturing suddenly to her child across the street, about a jogger pausing to stretch, about the deckhand on a boat we are meeting as he tosses the bow-line to shore.