IN SUBURBAN MAZES

Press, 25 August 1979, Page 17

IN SUBURBAN MAZES

The Marriage Maze. By Alison Gray. Cape Catley, 1979. 155 pp. $6.75 (paperback). Wifey. By Judy Blume. MacMillan, 1979. 296 pp. $12.40. (Reviewed by Lorna Buchanan)

Chance brought these two novels for review at the same time. Read together they offer striking contrasts and parallels. Both concern women in their thirties, searching for themselves and for a sense of purpose in marriages that have turned sour in spite of children and financial security. To stay or leave, to have affairs or not to have them, to trust husbands or not to trust them, to consult friends and then to accept their advice. . . In New Zealand or the United States the questions are almost identical — the answers utterly different. Alison Gray’s “Elizabeth” is a thoroughly conventional New Zealand girl of 15 years ago, plodding through office jobs, marrying early and with little experience, set on a suburban adventure with a man determined to build Eden and install his wife in its

kitchen. If the book plods in pedestrian style through the detail of New Zealand life, that is no more than appropriate to the style of life jt describes. Ms Gray makes compelling reading from familiar trivia. The last chapter, “Alone, and whole,” seems to provide a resolution of the disappointments. In fact. Elizabeth ends up earnest and self-centered to the point of being tediously selfish. Judy Blume’s “Sandy” walks the same road, but with many a fantasy and frolic along the way, and in the end she stays in her cocoon of appliances, four-minute sex, and little deceptions. She is. her doctor says, the healthiest sick person he has ever met. Does her husband still love her? ‘T’m here, aren’t I?” he tells her in a rare romantic outburst. “Wifey” manages to be very funny while stHl conveying the awful emptiness of a tired marriage. Sandy’s decision, to stay too busy amid house and children to have time to worry about husband, lovers, or sense of emptiness, is not a fashionable solution, at least in fiction. On balance, however, it looks more attractive than the determined loneliness at the end of “The Marriage Maze.”