Bizarre domestic comedy

Press, 23 June 1984, Page 20

Bizarre domestic comedy

Alexandra Freed. By Lisa Zeidner. Cape, 1983. 287 pp. $22.75.

Alexandra Freed, volatile, sexually vulnerable, All-American Jewish heroine, is raped by Walter Danner, volatile, sexually vulnerable All-American architect and property developer, in Fitler Square Philadelphia on Halloween. The consequences can only be catastrophic. Alexandra, unemployed failed Ph. D., must necessarily fall in love with her amiable assailant whose sole purpose in perpetrating the dastardly deed is to purge himself of the memories of his former wife, Judy, also an intellectual lady with a bad track record in marriage.

After Alex and the Fitler Square rapist team up, the ex-wife gets together with Alex’s adored brother Theo (yet another academic with a yen for China). The resulting bizarre domestic comedy (reminiscent of early Iris Murdoch), is, as to be expected, full of Sturm und Drang and heavy on the old Freudian and gestalt psychology.

Alex, with her struggle to quit smoking, cut down on ruinously expensive gourmet foods, and “make something of her life,” is a likable heroine in spite of her narcissism. Author Lisa Zeidner, herself a dishy-looking assistant professor at Rutgers University, has created a credible enough mouthpiece for her views on the disaffected American middle-class. Her prose is witty, racy, sometimes arch (though this is probably tongue-in-cheek since no real live English graduate whatever the calibre of her intellect would come out with some of the pretentious pronouncements Ms Freed feels obliged to make) “Alexandra Freed” — the title is a pun of course — is a cautionary love story, the moral of which the reader must be left to decide for herself. — Diane Prout.