Open Wound

DORA (224 pp.) -- Eleanor Green --'Doubleday ($2.50).

As a little girl Dora could never find a shell in 'which to hide. "Everything was difficult: there was a moral issue involved in almost every yes or no." Her mother was as charming and resourceful as Dora was gauche and indecisive; and her father . . . well, he was nowhere in sight. Dora suffered more than she knew from the absence of a strong masculine center in the family, who might have balanced her bafflingly cool and competent mother.

What happened to Dora when she grew up is the theme of Eleanor Green's consumingly tense novel. After the first few pages it is clear that a girl like Dora, suffering from a lifelong sense of inferiority towards her mother and seeking an object on which to pour the love her mother never quite accepted, is not likely to succeed in marriage--especially when she marries a man like Leo, a reserved, grave-miened scholar whom Dora adored as if he were a saint. Yet they lived together--in great happiness, thought Dora --for nine years. It was only after Leo came home from World War II that he left her: suddenly, enigmatically, and guiltily.

At this point Miss Green's finely stitched novel begins to come apart at the seams. Many marriages did, no doubt, smash up after the war without either participant clearly knowing the reason why. The insufficient reasons which Author Green implies for Leo's behavior are that his "extreme mental preoccupation made him an indifferent lover" and that he wanted to get back into the Roman Catholic Church. Dora collapses with a cry of bewildered pain--a cry whose discords are not altogether resolved by the diminished seventh on which the novel ends.

The reader will admire Miss Green's technical skill: her neat characterization, her sensitive use of language. But he is bound to feel that she has exposed him to a terrible battlefield of human suffering without an adequate explanation of why the guns went off.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.