Other Lips and Other Hearts by Joan Sanders (review)

Reviews 245 Like Hawthorne’s in his last phase, Kesey’s development reflects artistic fragmentation, incompleteness, and repetition. Both “The Day after Super­ man Died” (Kesey’s personal tribute to Neal Cassady) and Over the Border, a screenplay illustrated with drawings which Porter labels “philosophical cartoons for part-time adults,” reflect Kesey’s entrapment in the fossil record of the 1960s. In fact, there is a good deal of the cartoon in the melodramatic, alpha male-Oedipal visions of Ken Kesey. Too much, perhaps of the Merry Prank­ sters; too little of the mature visions that may have grown out of the lessons of the Age of Aquarius. Professor Porter’sbook would have been more useful had he moved beyond his considerable praise of style to consider a more integrated and critical assessment of the quality of Kesey’s vision as well as of its indebtedness to the social philosophies of the period which nourished it. The Art of Grit puts critical method in conflict with the demands of its subject. For one of the central problems in Kesey’sfiction is the uneasy alliance of style and message, of expression and vision. Much grit in the former; often a good deal of peach fuzz on the latter . RONALD CURRAN University of Pittsburgh Other Lips and Other Hearts. By Joan Sanders. (Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1982. 255 pages, $13.95.) Joan Sanders’s roots are in Montana and Utah, but though she started out writing Western stories for magazines, four of her books deal with seven­ teenth-century France and one with modern Sweden. Not until her sixth and current book, Other Lips and Other Hearts, has she returned to her western origins. The novel’s protagonist is Jasmine Redland, a writer who has pub­ lished several acclaimed novels and biographies but who is now afflicted by writer’s block and a deep, suicidal depression caused by two divorces in quick succession — first from Richard, a professor at Utah State University, and second from Gabor Nagy, a celebrated film director. Nagy she is well rid of; despite his international reputation as an artist, he is pompous, patronizing, insufferably smug, and sanctimoniously domineering. It is the loss of Richard that she laments; he was the love of her youth, and she still sees him as her only real love, despite the fact that he never read any of her books, barely tolerated her literary career, and in remarrying has acquired their ranch and even her beloved horse. Though both parties are at fault in the breakup of their marriage, it is Jasmine who suffers the stern disapproval of the Mormon culture she has rejected but that most of her friends and family still embrace. From the patriarchal perspective of the Latter-day Saints, Jasmine appears as an unrepentant bohemian or worse. Her current affair with a student half her age isunsatisfactory. He wants to marry and make an “honest” woman of her, but neither of them have any money, and Jasmine cannot bring herself to 246 Western American Literature accept an offer from Nagy to write the screenplay for his next film, since to do so would be to once more put herself into the hands of this bland Svengali. Her only reliable companion is her aged, wheezing bulldog Fanny, whose ferocious looks mask a timid temperament. The only outlet both for her depressed spirit and her writing block is a suicide notebook, to which she confides her regrets, anxieties, longings, and self-reproaches. Finding only futility in continued residence in southern California, Jasmine takes off on a journey into her past, both geographically and spiritu­ ally. Accompanied solely by Fanny, she drives to Utah — to Ogden, Logan, Bear Lake — where she ishalf welcomed, half scolded by relatives and friends whose proffered solace consists mainly of appeals for her to return to the bosom of the family and the church. Her odyssey into Mormon country con­ tains a good deal of satire, partly humorous, partly affectionate, at the culture she grew up in and to w'hich she can return only as an ironic visitor. It is, in fact, Jasmine’s humor that saves her from the slough of despond and that keeps...