Making Amends Expensive Habits

By Paul Gray

At 45, a celebrated writer named Margaret Flood receives the news that her heart is damaged and her days numbered. This death sentence concentrates her mind wonderfully. She first thinks, naturally, of herself, "a sick woman in her middle years, betrayed by one man, abandoned by another." But as she retreats from the hospital into her aerie of an apartment overlooking Central Park, Margaret moves beyond present distress toward memories of the people who have helped to make her what she has become: a successful, solitary, dying woman.

Maureen Howard's fifth novel offers far less bitterness than its premise promises. Her heroine will not be content with simply calling up the past and assessing blame. Margaret wants to make amends for her own mistakes, in her life and in her books. She is also willing to go to extraordinary lengths to stay alive.

Thus John Flood, her first husband, appears in the narrative in three incarnations. He is the young doctor pursuing a brilliant future while his equally young wife sells her first book and discovers his infidelity with a night nurse. He is then the aggrieved ex-husband, complaining that Margaret's popular second novel, a "revenge tragedy" about their broken marriage, has damaged his reputation. And he is also the man, now a respected heart surgeon and administrator in Baltimore, to whom Margaret runs with a plea for a second opinion and chance: "Give me borrowed time, six months the way they do in bogus movies. Fair trade-off. Take it, Johnny. Take the rewrite."

Margaret's revised version of her life introduces characters who were once secondary in her fiction but who assume a new importance. Dr. Flood, remarried and remorseful that in his career he "has hoed a narrow row," assigns Margaret's case to a talented younger colleague. An operation seems in order. Whether it succeeds or not, the patient wants to explain to her only child, Bayard, 16, the son of her second marriage, why his parents broke up and why his once aristocratic father, Pinkham Strong, has become the alcoholic custodian of a secondhand-clothes shop in lower Manhattan.

Margaret's written apologia to her son forms one vivid strand of this intricately interwoven novel. She and Pinkham had flourished during the 1960s. It was a time of adolescent hope, particularly for people entering their 30s and 40s. She writes, "Your father, think of it, Bayard, was rebuilding slums. There was to be warmth and light, Shakespeare and the beat of African drums . . . Your mother wrapped in a slave's headcloth above a bastard dashiki. French champagne with grits. See the good of it before you laugh at us."

That final request applies not just to Bayard but to everyone who enters the dense, diffracted world of Expensive Habits. What Margaret Flood calls "the unflattering double vision of time" renders nearly everything that passes under her scrutiny as fused contradictions. With the best will in the world, people fail each other. Careful planning gives way to absurd accidents. There is a shocking death in this book, but the circumstances that lead up to it seem as fanciful and inevitable as the consequences that follow.

As she has done in her other novels and in the prizewinning autobiography Facts of Life (1978), the author smuggles more subjects into a book than its length seems to allow. In addition to Flood and her extended if disaffected families, Expensive Habits gives intense, alert attention to the domestic problems of a Hispanic maid, the political troubles in U.S. life from Senator Joe McCarthy through Watergate, and the waning days of a small tribe of New York radicals and intellectuals. Howard, 55, has skills that do not comfortably translate into screaming paperback covers and megabuck reprints. She is one of those rare contemporaries whose work demands, and deserves, rereadings.