Time and Tide.

In her rebellion against the tyranny of her husband, Nell leaves her family to search for love and adventure, while her separation from her husband becomes a battle that eventually pulls her two beloved sons away from her

Acclaimed Irish writer O'Brien (Lantern Slides, 1990, etc.) explores that ``great chasm'' between mothers and would-be mothers, with smotheringly unrelieved lyricism. Nell, a typical O'Brien protagonist, with more emotions than good sense, has rebelled against her narrow Irish upbringing by marrying an older man who's as tyrannical and unbending as her devoutly Catholic but well-intentioned mother had ever been. Later, Nell's two sons, Paddy and Tristan, become pawns as Nell, trying to escape the disintegrating marriage, has to contend with her husband's cruel machinations to prevent her from taking the children with her. The couple finally divorce; Nell gains shared custody of the boys, then begins to make a new life--not all that successfully, though, for poor Nell is a bad picker. She loses her heart to philandering Duncan; accepts drugs from the evil Dr. ``Rat''; and suffers a nasty accident when sinister Boris and girlfriend Olga move in, suggesting a m‚nage … trois. She does have a job--one of those vague kinds at a publishing house--which apparently pays the rent, at least most of the time, but this is not a novel about trying to be Super Mom; rather, it is about love- -for men and for children--that is never fully requited. Nell's sons, once loving, turn away from their mother as they grow older; and when older son Paddy drowns, all that Nell has left ``is the involuntary shudder that keeps telling us we are alive.'' Poor Nell, poor mothers, poor women. A great universal theme, but Nell is just too frail and foolish to do it justice. Not O'Brien's best. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

O'Brien's current fame rests largely on short stories in the New Yorker vein. But it was novels like The Country Girls ( LJ 2/15/60) and Girls in Their Married Bliss ( LJ 1/15/68) that launched her highly publicized career in the 1960s, and the loyal readership of her longer works will not be disappointed by her latest. Once naive adolescents preyed upon by society, O'Brien's characters are now battle-weary women preyed upon by society. Time and Tide ups the stakes by sending its protagonist to hell: separation from marriage and children precipitate her descent into a surreal underworld of therapy, drugs, and sexual assault. The power of the novel lies less in its hallucinatory effects than in its sustained evocation of alienation. It used to be said that O'Brien's fiction was a manual in survival tactics, but Time and Tide is not so helpful. Its expression of personal isolation and defeat registers in prose of new intensity and vigor.
- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York
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