Building on a success

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 18

Building on a success

Second Heaven. By Judith Guest. Allen Lane, 1983. 320 pp. $19.95 Judith Guest is a young married woman who succeeded wildly with her previous publication “Ordinary People.” From that book came a film applauded as a work of psychological intertwining of emotional conflicts. This, its successor, was begun previous to the first book, but not finished until six years thereafter. The mixture is comfortably surfaceanalytically familiar. Individuals, basically with integrity and warmth of feeling are unable to find meeting points of relationship, but generally discover others with whom they can mesh outside of the traditional family. They know the pains and numbness of separation and divorce, the gaping emptiness between generations and the agony of adolescence. This time a remarkably immature 16-year-old youth enters the household of a divorcee after being consistently beaten up by his disturbed

father. She and her lawyer-lover rescue him and in the process she discovers a purpose in life and is once more awoken sensuously. The break-up of families is one of the intensely important aspects of our Western world. Mrs Guest, however, as is almost universal for such novels, writes of a verbal, introspective, insightful, fairly comfortable middle-class and their tribulations in such a collapse and meticulous rebuilding. This is only one section of the picture. The ensuing danger is that the whole phenomenon may be interpreted in terms, such as here, of dissillusioned professionals in mid-life crises seeking reassurance from lithe young bodies and restoring quaint terrace-style cottages. With a massive publicity campaign and the success of the previous book, “Second Heaven” must continue to help the author communicate meaningfully with her bank manager. — Ralf Unger.