Letty Fox, her luck (A Harvest/HBJ book) [Paperback]

Seurat, Pissaro, and Van Gogh painted pictures made up of points of color---seen too closely, they look just like a bunch of dots, without much meaning. Step back and you see a sophisticated landscape or portrait. These were the pointillistes of French Impressionist art. As I read this penetrating character study constructed of 517 pages of trivia, banal conversations, epigrams, and thoughts, I thought over and over that this novel resembled more than a little a pointilliste painting. Any one page seems trivial and even directionless. As you continue, you realize that a powerful portrait is being built. There is no plot except the life of Letty Fox, a strong young woman whose licentious, impecunious, immature/mature ways stem from her own dysfunctional family background of similar qualities. It is a coming of age tale that takes place from the mid-1920s to 1945 in New York, New Jersey, and (occasionally) England and France in a welter of bizarre characters. Letty Fox is the kind of person who, in real life, never writes her autobiography, or if she does, writes in a most self-aggrandizing manner. She longs for romance but gets mostly men interested in one-night stands, for marriage to a wealthy man, but most of them skip town, for interesting work but she tires of a job quickly, for a normal family (but does such an animal exist ? I think Stead would say no.) Letty Fox is in love with life, but unlike some of her leftwing friends, she is more realistic. She samples whatever she can, but chooses very little. Contradictions abound. Freedom vs marriage. Sex vs. love. Friends vs. living alone. Idealism vs. cynicism. Above all, Letty is a feminist, though she never refers to herself in such terms.. She refuses to kowtow to current prejudices, yet revels in modern New York life as much as she can. You can pick out hundreds of quotations like the following to express her feelings:

"I sometimes wondered at the infinite distance between the state of not being married---and whatever the gradation of not being married, it made no difference---and the state of being married. How did people bridge the gap ? It seemed to happen to others---most others: never to me; and I thought it very peculiar. I couldn't figure it out; perhaps I was too young, anyway; but it savored to me of magic, and I felt very miserable that in this modern world something so primary, this first of all things to a woman, smacked so strongly of the tribal priest, the smoky cult, the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the hidden mystery. It didn't seem fair. We should have abolished all that with enlightenment." p.413-14

"I was born to live with all the ardor of my blood and to mate and breed, and laugh at my grandchildren. These monastic notions were not for me." (rejects sacrificial fantasies, rejects ideals of doing good) p.419

"What is the use of a man if one can't be forthright with him ? I would never hedge and plot with a man, thought I." p.489

While Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children" focusses on a man and family relations, LF:HL is firmly about one woman and the slow transformation of her connection to family, friends, the world of work, and the world of sex and romance. It's not an easy read, because at times you feel you are not getting anywhere. Perhaps it could have been cut down, but then again, maybe the repetitiveness is an integral part of the whole picture. You have to keep your mind on that picture, not the myriad of dots. If you do, you'll find a most interesting novel, like Letty Fox herself, not at all average.

Many rate Christina Stead among the finest modern writers of the century, and there's almost no denying her skill with shaping a beautiful sentence. Unfortunately, Stead has trouble sometimes shaping a good novel--she tends to go and on--, and this deficiency is largely at work in what many consider her second-best work (after THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN), LETTY FOX: HER LUCK.

Letty is a young woman in Manhattan living during wartime largely by her wits, and the beginning twenty pages--detailing her move into a new apartment in the Village--is so marvelous that your readerly expectations become raised to a very high degree. Stead dashes them, however, once you move to her life's narrative, which mostly details a series of women in her extended family depending on men for both money and affection, and doing nearly everything they can think of doing to acquire these things. Some of her ideas are brilliant, and the sentences read gorgeously--but you keep wishing for someone to step in and cut all the repetitions. Readers may find their patience tried by the 600-some pages of very little action, and yet Letty herself remains a very memorable achievement, an addition to a gallery of heroines of such questionable scruples as Defoe's Moll Flanders or Cary's Sarah Monday.