The Party’s Over

THE SWEETEST DREAM: A Novel, by Doris Lessing. HarperCollins: 480 pp., $26.95.

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“The Sweetest Dream,” Doris Lessing’s 50th book and 24th novel, spans two continents and three decades, revisiting places and passions that have nourished the great writer’s greatest works of realism: London, Africa, communism, war, feminism, race, love, literature, truth. Readers who have followed Lessing to other planets and zones will tingle with memory and expectation as they pick up “The Sweetest Dream.” And surely there are riches in this volume. Lessing renders the spirit of an age as few writers can, and she demonstrates the ‘60s zeitgeist convincingly through tender friendship between boys and girls, growing intimacy between women, a melting of reticence, easy conviviality and, of course, drugs.

But overall, the novel disappoints. The sharp reflection distinguishing the best of Lessing--from her early “The Grass Is Singing” and “In Pursuit of the English” through “The Golden Notebook” and “The Children of Violence” series and most recently in volumes 1 and 2 of her autobiography--is largely gone, leaving us lost in unfocused scene and story, which Lessing periodically tries to whip into shape with anger and mockery.

The first two-thirds of “The Sweetest Dream” take place during the ‘60s and ‘70s in a London house in which three generations of women--all psychically wounded from war and revolutionary politics and politicos--struggle to survive and ensure the survival of the next generation. The women are connected through Comrade Johnny, as narrator and characters mockingly call the novel’s chief scoundrel, a Communist Party hotshot. Julia Lennox, the owner of the big old house, is Comrade Johnny’s mother, a genteel German-born matriarch. Frances is his ex-wife, whom he’s abandoned in his ongoing search for a woman who’s a true comrade. Sylvia is Johnny’s stepdaughter, whose own mother has been driven mad by not one but two communist husbands, and whom Johnny dumps on Julia and Frances as he moves on in his never-ending quest for a comrade-mate.

As Comrade Johnny marches in again and again with all-knowing nods, revolutionary salutes, denunciations (“bourgeois scum”) and expectations of a free meal for himself and whatever comrades he has in tow, Frances oversees the lives of their sons and the lives of a changing and growing cast of 1960s waifs whose homes compel them to seek safe haven with “earth-mother” Frances. So generous is Frances that she houses not only damaged kids but even her replacement, Johnny’s psychotic wife, as well as another lunatic, the wife of Frances’ lover. Here we have the novel’s scheme. Comrade Johnny and his Party pitted against Frances’ party: an ongoing gathering around the kitchen table, saving the people against saving people.

The sides are clearly drawn, but too little else is. Years blend into years, insignificant events pile up and significant events get lost in a kind of vaporous hippie soap opera. Frances falls in love, and we hardly notice. Her goodness and righteousness feel generic and repetitious. Comrade Johnny grabs our attention at first: His exploitation of family contrasts amusingly and zestfully with his plans for an exploitation-free world, but his dogmatic repertoire grows predictable, and he quickly becomes a cartoon. Minor characters in the London section are often indistinguishable, and one has to work hard to follow what’s happening, and to whom. If Lessing is trying for a dreamy, druggy ‘60s effect, she doesn’t pull it off.

What cuts through the foggy London section is hatred. Frances and Julia grow closer and closer over the years, bonded in their loathing for Comrade Johnny. Once Lessing and her deputized characters dispense with Johnny and his “stupid” dream, Frances and Julia move on to denounce other “world-changing” delusions and “isms.” Favorite targets include anti-nuclear activists who think like children and feminists who loathe their own sons and whose ideology bans love and happiness with men, whom they pounce upon like “cats on sparrows.” But the tirades tire.

The last third of the novel takes place in the ‘80s in the African nation of Zimlia, a fictionalized Zimbabwe, and is more successful. Sylvia, with Frances’ and Julia’s help, has survived a rejecting communist father and stepfather, a mad mother, anorexia and mental illness to become a missionary doctor in Zimlia. Here, hatred of ideologues and ideology still reigns, but Lessing critiques through rich description and drama.

Schools and hospitals that the Zimlian revolutionaries have promised rarely exist, and when they do, the schools often have no books or teachers and the hospitals no roofs. While Sylvia becomes both teacher and doctor, the rest of Frances’ ‘60s strays show up in Africa, and they, along with Johnny’s African “comrades,” unravel the last shreds of the dream of social justice. There’s no changing the world, Lessing’s story suggests: All the sweet dreams, from whatever decade, turn into nightmares.

All around Zimlia, poor people are dying of AIDS, taking children with them or leaving them behind. It is only in the actions of a few that we can take any hope. Many minor characters in the African section win our hearts: old people, sick people and unsung heroines conspiring on their behalf. Lessing’s good guys and bad guys alike have memorable presence, pulling us into the novel’s moral drama, though one wishes the cast of villains in her African panorama included players of the colonial past and the globalizing present and not just those on Lessing’s ideological hit list.

Twentieth century radical politics is a mad affair, with the best and the worst of our kind emerging. Lessing put in her time in the political trenches, and she has the battle scars to show for it: a post-Stalinist post-traumatic stress syndrome that makes her tremble and shout at the first sight of most any ideology. Even in her most politically aligned period, when she was still sympathetic to communism, Lessing never endorsed using the novel for political expression, criticizing novels that were “tracts about progress ... the dreadful lifeless products of socialist realism.”

“The Sweetest Dream,” though, reads often like anti-socialist realism, a politically driven tract declaring progress a false dream that is thick, ironically enough, with the kind of fixed opinions and oversimplifications that, to Lessing’s mind, wreck both social and literary promise.

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Nora Eisenberg is the author of the recently published novel “The War at Home.”Lessing put in her time in the political trenches, and she has the battle scars to show for it.