Anguish Artist

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE BLEEDING HEART by Marilyn French Summit; 377 pages; $12.95

The bestseller is the AK-47 of the women's liberation movement. It has proved to be a highly effective weapon: relatively cheap, easy to mass produce, reliable and deadly even in inexperienced hands. A case in point was Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room (1977). It hit middle-class America at the right time. Consciousness was up; stale marriages were crumbling like mummies exposed to the air; Jacks were breaking their crowns and Jills stopped tumbling after. The Women's Room certainly contributed to the body count. Its views were stated with unnerving energy and conviction; the prose was tight; the suburban settings had the authentic odor of nylon pile, and the characters were quivering chunks torn from the author's own life. Her soul on ice, Marilyn French sounded like a feminist Eldridge Cleaver.

The Bleeding Heart suggests a slight thaw. Its core is a seemingly endless and inconclusive dialogue--SALT talks in the gender wars--between a 45-year-old woman and her lover, a middle-aged businessman. Dolores Durer is a professor of English at a Boston college, divorced and the mother of grown children. She is in Oxford, England, to complete research for her book, Lot's Wife: A Study of the Identification of Women with Suffering.

Victor Morrissey, 50, is in Britain to open a branch office. His wife is in a wheelchair in Scarsdale, N.Y. She lost both legs when, enraged and intoxicated after learning of her husband's philandering, she drove her car into a concrete abutment. The relentless tenet of The Bleeding Heart is that women always suffer and pay more than men.

Even Dolores' name is a constant and heavyhanded reminder: the Latin dolor, for pain; durare, to endure. Victor means victor, the confident, satiated gladiator who pats his woman on the rump and rushes off to compete for glory and riches. He gets ample time to give his side of the story. The man is bright but no intellectual threat to Dr. Durer's fevered assertions and generalizations. Still, he may be too smart to challenge such filibusters as, "What I want, Victor, is to change the world ... To make it a place where women's way of seeing, thinking, feeling, is as valid as men's. Where maybe even men will join the women because they will see that women's way of thinking is more decent, more humane, and in the long run, Victor, more likely to preserve the human race!"

Dolores never backs down; her self-respect is at stake, and it is apparently still too new and fragile to allow concessions. One can admire her for this, even while she uses her vulnerability to assume the dual role of a martyred carrier of great truths and a political radical who believes "you have to be narrow when you're at war." Neither is it difficult to understand Dolores' need for Victor's warm body at the same time that she resents him. She has had it rough, as her copious flashbacks to a miserable marriage and family tragedies indicate. Life is messy, after all, and consistency is often the first casualty.

But a messy novel about life's disorder does not work any better than a tedious novel about tedium. The Bleeding Heart can be entered in both categories. Its beginning reads as if D.H. Lawrence and Erica Jong had collaborated on a soap opera. Victor and Dolores first meet on a train between London and Oxford, silently swap glances and end up in bed at her apartment without exchanging ten words or knowing each other's last names. A sample description of this zipless encounter: "They clutched and caressed as their hearts pumped, as the sparks fell, as fiery charges burned them up." Sometimes the prose strains for an effect that becomes downright aphasic: "Eccentrics they were, she supposed, her friends, but fun."

Paradoxically, much of the dialogue works. French has a knack for orchestrating voices. Even they grow stale, how ever, as the conversations between Victor and Dolores come to follow a predictable cycle: Scotch drinking, lovemaking, remembrances of painful pasts and talk that adds up to a feminist equivalent of Soviet socialist realism. Yet The Bleeding Heart is not just a popular novel for the female market. Attentive male readers will discover why so many wom en are now saying "Yes, yes" when there's "No, no" in their eyes.

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