Proustian feminist

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 24

Proustian feminist

The Question of Max. By Amanda Cross. Virago, 1989. 197 pp. $14.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ken Strongman)

It is an unalloyed pleasure to find a new crime writer. Not that Amanda Cross is that new, having been writing since 1964. It is the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, an eminent professor at Columbia University, under which guise she has published influential litcrit and feminist studies. Her alter ego’s heroine detective is Kate Fansler, another eminent female professor, married to a prestigious lawyer. She is a thoroughly engaging person, as long as you like them fiercely bright, exacting, scholarly, and unarguably feminist, albeit of the thinking person’s variety. “The Question of Max” is a perfectly satisfying read in the whodunnit sense. But the plot is really just a vehicle for some marvellous writing and some compelling description. This book is a more impressive polemic for feminism than I have seen. And by the way, it contains delightful accounts of how to live with teenage males iivthe house,

which should be prescribed reading for anyone in that position. And by the way of this by the way, there are arguments of great charm about almost anything. Most of all though, Kate Fansler via Amanda Cross gives Carolyn Heilbrun an excuse to write. “A Question of Max” reads with a beautifully paced, light-hearted but thorough gravity, as though James Joyce and Marcel Proust had combined to turn the Book of Common Prayer into a thriller. Consider this: “... is there a beginning to this story, or are you still collecting stray information and trying to get it to hang together? You know, you can tell us, and then forget you did. Or you can ask questions, and take them away in the corner and chew on them. But if you want to discuss this at all, and I rather get the impression that you do, could we try to get the points into some sort of order, rational, logical, sequential, as you prefer?” There is a great deal of this sort ol thing, and much use of words such as "whence,” all of which makes me very keen to get my hands on the seven other Amanda Cross novels.