Those Giants Let Them Rise!

Melanie, daughter of a musician and a psychoanalyst, withdraws from reality to live in a fantasy world of her own

On a spook-laden Halloween night, Melanie travels from her digs to her mother's house, which from the portentousness of the language and conjured-up memories might properly be located in Birnam Wood. Instead, Melanie emerges in Forest Hills, where her psychoanalyst mother, Laura, lives with her lesbian loverherself the first wife of Melanie's dead father, a failed musician whose aspirations and life were snuffed out by the narcissistic Laura. Melanie's one love has been the giant Gabriel, who turned out to be impotent, an apparent result of his giantism, another being the soft bones that signal early death. It becomes clear that Gabriel, a painter whose canvases had bestowed great beauty upon Melanie, is a symbol for the artists she presently gathers around her, each trying to find and preserve one transcendental moment. The novel is marred not only by overwriting but by its non-credible characterizations. Duncan wrote A Wreath of Pale White Roses. February
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The neurasthenic world of a sensitive soul forms this second novel from the co-creator of the Woman's Salon (an alternative literary network supporting women's work). Melanie lives half in reality, half in memory, as she struggles to escape her past. The daughter of a failed musician and an unhappy psychiatrist, she must overcome the scars caused by her father's death, her own obesity and asthma, and her mother's hostility. As a teenager, she flees to the arms of Gabriel, and artist and "giant," who re-creates her in his art, making her beautiful; later she leaves him to become a nurturing Earth Mother to New York's artists. Told entirely through Melanie's eyes, the novel is claustrophobic and so full of self-righteousness that one longs for Melanie to confront her fears. Though Duncan clearly can write, this is a disappointment from an artistic and feminist point of view. Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.