The Secret Defector

During his struggle to find a new life for himself in 1956 London, self-exiled American radical Gus Black enters into an affair with novelist Rose O'Malley and struggles to become a writer himself

The return of the great social iconoclast, his fourth novel in a quarter of a century (Weekend in Dinlock, Going Away, Zone of the Interior), with the last bow of many earlier characters in his books. Like John Reed, Sigal is a renowned American Red, a kind of amusingly serious self-made writer-outcast-Don Juan with a two- fisted history of life among the down-and-out. Here, he tells about his earliest days as an apprentice writer lusting to break loose with his first book but immured in writer's block. The problem: as Gus Black, he's living with Rose O'Malley (read Doris Lessing), a novelist from South Africa now in London, nine years his senior, who is writing Loose Leaves from a Random Life (read The Golden Notebook, in which Sigal is Saul Green) with daily installments about their love affair and Rose's cannibalizing Gus's notes about that affair. Rose is a great cook (whom Gus often flops onto the kitchen floor for sex) but also a humorless Socialist with a genius for analyzing the Oedipal roots of every move Gus makes. After her book comes out, Gus complains that ``She didn't even get my orgasms right.'' At last they part and Gus goes to work for British Vogue as the resident Red, and as a wandering BBC-TV interviewer digging into the lower classes. He's sold out? For the moment. Real people, including Colin MacInnes and E.M. Forster, pop up for rich portraits, and in fact nearly the whole British writing Establishment gets tarred and feathered by Gus, whose idols are Hemingway and Mailer. Gus also goes in for LSD and treatment for ``schizophrenia'' with the messianic Marxist shrink Willie Last (from Zone of the Interior). Back in the States, he's an overpaid writer-in-residence at a California college but returns to England to save his Red soul. Sigal digs hard into union life and poverty in both countries, and his vigorous panning brings up many fine gold flakes among the gravel. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This raucous, hardboiled novel by the author of Going Away (Carroll & Graf, 1984) follows journalist, Marxist, and expatriate Gus Black through three decades. In the late Fifties, Gus avoids deportation from London to the States by hiding out with fellow Marxist and current lover Rose O'Malley. A published writer and respected feminist, Rose uses Gus as her current literary subject. Gus uses Rose for sex, until she wants more from the relationship and he sets off for the coal mines. The miners' solidarity inspires Gus, who writes a book that eventually lands him a job at Vogue. He spins his wheels from the Sixties through the Eighties, going crazy, becoming more cynical, and embarking on a doomed marriage. A teaching job in the States brings him neither contentment nor a cure for his sexual wanderlust. Gus and the reader are left dissatisfied at the novel's close.
- Brack Stovall, Carrollton P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.