Unreliably Yours

Harvey continuedfrom previous page number oftechnical difficulties which Saramago fails to ever fully resolve. Whereas in Blindness the government 's inept efforts to contain the epidemic — they put all the victims in an old insane asylum — leads to a riveting concentration of scene, the less palpable epidemic of passive dissent which erupts in Seeing results in an unsatisfying diffuseness. We get a large number of hastily sketched episodes whose relation to each other lacks the sense of inevitable and enthralling disaster of those in Blindness. And this is where that style is most culpable. Henry James tells us that, for the novelist, the art of interesting us in things can only be the art of representing them. Saramago openly and, at times, successfully flouts this dictum: very often, though, we feel that we are reading not a novel but merely the précis of one. Seeing contains many pleasures, not least of which is a reminder of the genius of common language ; but after three hundred pages of "the tremor in the voice, the grief-stricken face, the occasional glimmer of a barely repressed tear," who does not long to be shown the world more accurately, to be told that the night sky is a "heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Giles Harvey is afreelance book critic. He divides his time between New York and Somerset, England. Unreliably Yours Dorian Gossy Freeing Vera Elissa Raffa Permanent Press http://www.thepermanentpress.com 264 pages; cloth, $20.00 Freeing Vera involves an activist artist, lesbians. New York City, spousal abuse, multiple sclerosis, and a gay dad. It also features a favorite American story: that of escape, the song of the open road. All good, sexy, saleable elements for the twenty-first century American novel, struggling as it is for airtime against reality TV. exotic videogames, and overheated news broadcasting. But does this novel's particular bag of tricks cohere into literature? In a post-therapy world, it's almost quaint to ground a novel's plot in a daughter's quest to liberate her disabled mother from a bad marriage, but this is Elissa A. Raffa's premise in Freeing Vera. A good therapist would tell Frannie D'Amato to move on from her obsession to persuade Vera, her mother, to reject her husband, Frannie's father Anthony. But Raffa raises the stakes: Anthony so preoccupies himself with his career as a surgeon and, later, with a male lover that he often strands his disabled wife, forcing Vera to sit for hours in her own urine, unable to reach a toilet by herself. Vera herself consistently denies that she needs rescuing, tied as she is to her husband in the blind death-do-us-part way that reflects the gender role Zeitgeist of the 1 950s. Predictably . Anthony resents Frannie's meddling, though eventually he does make reluctant concessions to his wife's needs by hiring outside help. Frannie's sisters fail to perceive the gravity of what Frannie has seen for years; they seem more interested in securing Anthony's fortune for themselves than in freeing Vera into the feminist paradise that Frannie envisions for her. Despite her best efforts to effect change in her family, the only person who does change is Frannie herself. Her family's circumstances shift and twitch, but the principal players remain essentially the same selfish or selfless characters throughout the novel. Vera is so consistently passive and unwilling to help herself that she hardly seems worth saving. For instance, late in the novel, after Anthony has been discovered with his boyfriend. Larry, and despite his years of neglect and her increasing debility from MS, Vera can still utter phrases such as "I like my life the way it is. There's nothing to talk about. I'm happy with what I have." There's no irony, no reconciled rage, nothing that feels like acceptance earned through hard contemplation. She can be summed up as the stereotypical victim wife and mother. / mustfinally admit that this novel reminds me ofthat contemporary phenomenon, the blog. Frannie's father, Anthony, is harder to summarize , since he begins the novel as the hot-headed, short-tempered, and self...