LOVE, AGAIN.

A story of love and desire in an older woman finds sixty-five-year-old Sarah Durham in relationships with two much-younger men and follows her struggles with the feelings of her youth. 75,000 first printing. $85,000 ad/promo. Tour.

"The country of love... a desert of deprivation... longing and jealousy" is the focus of Lessing's newest novel . She charts her heroine's emotional landscape with assiduous attention to the most minute nuances. Sarah Durham was widowed young; now in her mid-60s, she is manager of and playwright for a London fringe theater group. A production of a play based on the journals and music of a 19th-century quadroon from Martinique, Julie Vairon, inflames Sarah's dormant sexual impulses. And she is not the only one: all of the actors, the director and a rich patron, Stephen Ellington-Smith, are also sublimely seduced by Julie's words, music and the few portraits of her that survive. In this highly charged atmosphere, suggestive of the magical transformations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sarah craves an actor half her age (who leads her on, but beds others); Stephen, whose marriage is tragically unhappy, becomes unhealthily obsessed with the dead Julia; Sarah and the director then acknowledge their sexual longing for each other?and on and on it goes, in a quadrille of lovesick changing partners. Lessing's perceptive insights into the condition of being female and elderly and emotionally excluded ("on the other shore, watching") are as astute as anything she has ever written, and so are her comments on contemporary English society and on human nature in general. Although the book is long and rambling, asking much of a reader's patience and willingness to spend so much time inside Sarah's head, Lessing, whose memoir, Under My Skin, appeared last year, wields a formidable analytic intelligence that makes this work provocative and often astonishingly beautiful.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A probing and provocative examination of the experience of love as the mind and body approach old age, by the eminent British author best known for The Golden Notebook, her classic depiction of woman's fate (which this new novel intermittently evokes and resembles). Sarah Durham is 65, long widowed and freed of most family responsibilities. Yet she's burdened by the needs of her teenaged niece Joyce (whose parents virtually abandon her to Sarah's care), and also handles a demanding job as all-purpose manager (and sometime writer and director) with a thriving London theater. A play in production, Julie Vairon, requires Sarah to research the life and work of its title character, a beautiful quadroon girl from Martinique whom various men loved to distraction and who spent the last years of her brief life in France, where she became an accomplished composer and a famous diarist. The image of this mysterious woman's mingled happiness and despair reawakens in Sarah feelings long suppressed, as do the flirtations of a handsome young actor who joins the play's cast, as well as the more comfortable (though no less erotic) presence of its 35-year-old director, a man irrevocably committed to his family. We feel throughout this absorbing story--told both from Sarah's viewpoint and in its author's confident omniscient voice--the pressure of a preternaturally keen analytical intelligence, making every vividly dramatized scene resonate with judicious commentary. The web of sensation, emotion, and fantasy that all but overpowers Sarah during her reawakening is woven with clarity and force, and when Lessing frankly describes Sarah's sexual rekindling, you almost feel the heat rising off the pages. Lessing is a contemporary George Eliot, an intellectual whose imagination is firmly grounded in the sensual life and the natural world. Love, Again is a triumphant vindication of her literary method. (Book-of-the-Month alternate selection; $85,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lessing's latest protagonist is a 65-year-old woman who falls for two very young men.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

At 65, Sarah Durham finds herself suddenly, flamingly, in love with a handsome actor who is young enough to be her grandson. Why now? She married young, widowed young, and raised two children. Smart and attractive, she's written a successful play, and she's involved in the joyful group delirium of putting the show on stage. Why this young man? She has nothing in common with him. Then her desire unaccountably shifts to someone else. Part of Sarah longs to go back to her cool elderly persona, "all passion spent," but she knows her wildness is from her own submerged self. Yet more precious to her than any physical passion is her exciting friendship with a man nearer her age; he's also insanely obsessed with someone unattainable. As always, Lessing illuminates the secret intimacy and grief that are "the other side of the well-lit and ordered world we know." With compassion and intelligence, she shows how precarious we all are, how close to those who are crazy and helpless and outside. At the same time she writes about the sane, ordered world with irony and wit. There are dazzling, unforgettable vignettes here, private and public, that change the way you see your life. The trouble is that this groundbreaking story, these brilliant moments, are nearly buried by interminable rumination and chitchat and random incident. Even Lessing's legions of fans will find this hard to read. Careful though, she saves some of her most acerbic putdowns for stupid, ignorant reviewers. Hazel Rochman