Suburban Furies

By Melvin Maddocks

ORDINARY PEOPLE by JUDITH GUEST 263 pages. Viking. $7.95.

Judith Guest, 40, housewife and mother of three sons, living in Edina, Minn., sat down one day like a lot of other housewives to write a novel. The only difference is, her self-addressed brown envelope did not keep coming back. After two tries it became the first unsolicited manuscript to be published by the Viking Press since 1949.

If this rare publishing event leads any reader to expect a wildly experimental act-of-the-imagination, he has read too many commercial novels about uncommercial success, and he will be disappointed. Ordinary People is a quite good but thoroughly conventional novel that reads, in fact, like the old-pro product of an intelligent, thoroughly practiced veteran. Ms. Guest's hardly unorthodox subject is a middle-class American family from the Middle West. Make that upper-middle-class: the Jarretts live in Lake Forest, Ill., and father happens to be a tax lawyer. Mother runs a spick-and-span home (she is death on water spots in the shower) and plays golf and bridge on the side. Conrad, 17, is the sort of bright boy who ends up on the swimming team: clean and no-sweat even in his sports.

TV Dinner. Only one thing spoils this family-sitcom idyl: Conrad's older brother is dead, drowned in a boating accident that Conrad survived. Survival leaves Conrad feeling so guilty that he attempts suicide and has to be sent to a mental hospital, passing on his guilt, in turn, to father and mother.

Picking up the story after Conrad returns home, Ms. Guest deals with love and hate, forgiveness and the lack of it, madness and death--the themes appropriate to Greek tragedy. But she must deal with them in the terms of the well-made suburban novel. Panic equals the rattle of father's ice cube in one-too-many martinis. Despair equals the hundred small ways a Christmas Day falls apart, even when the keys to a new Le Mans for Conrad lie under the tree. Loneliness gets spelled out in the instructions on a frozen TV dinner.

The author writes almost too unerringly clever dialogue. Everything is buried under the ubiquitous wisecrack--the ironic putdowns and self-putdowns by which Americans play tag with their terror of failure. For failure is finally what Ordinary People is about. It may be Guest's ultimate irony that the older brother's drowning and Conrad's attempted suicide are only symbols for spiritual death--for a thousand subtle methods of neglect and undernourishment by means of which loved ones kill and are killed within the family circle.

What is this emotional malaise for which domesticated Americans pay the day-to-day price? Here again Guest is conventional. Too much self-control, she implies, too little trust of one's feelings. Thus the nearest to a savior the novel boasts is a flip-hip psychiatrist who eats doughnuts, drinks awful instant coffee and shares the floor with his patients because he can't afford a couch. His message to Conrad comes perilously close to the slogan of the '60s: LET IT ALL HANG OUT. Guest's alternate solution: the love of a good woman. Jeannine, who sings soprano in the choir to Conrad's tenor, almost backs into the '50s.

The form, the style of the novel dictate an ending more smooth than convincing. As a novelist who warns against the passion for safety and order that is no passion at all, Guest illustrates as well as describes the problem. She is neat and ordered, even at explaining that life is not neat and ordered. Thus the suburban novel takes on the manicured-lawn aspects of its subject; and in its well-lighted game rooms the characters seem like padded billiard balls, they carom so discreetly.

Give the author credit though. She has written a truly haunted story in which agony gives gloss a run for the money. The Furies in her suburb are real, even if she seems to banish them with a spray of Airwick.

Melvin Maddocks

The minor miracle that began when Viking bought an agentless, over-the-transom novel called Ordinary People did not stop there. Sales to Redbook, Ballantine Paperbacks, Reader's Digest Condensed Books and the Book-of-the-Month Club soon followed. Robert Redford's company has just bought the film rights. Judith Guest still does not have an agent, but with any luck she stands to collect something like half a million dollars. Will the resulting cash and carrying-on spoil things in the big, elm-shrouded house in the Minneapolis suburb where the author lives with her husband, three sports-mad sons aged 16, twelve and eleven, and a female malamute named Pax? "God, I hope not," says Ms. Guest. "I like it the way it is."

Total Amateur. But when she allows herself to look back on how things were during the three years it took to write Ordinary People, cleverness and common sense struggle with a kind of Erma Bombeck rue. "Nobody had any underwear," she recollects. "Truth to tell, my family is very tolerant. But some days I'd look at the house and think it was a mess and say to myself 'Why are you doing this?' " She wrote in the mornings when the house emptied, never at night. And rarely in the summer because the boys were out of school.

Though Viking did very little editing on her book, by all recognizable standards Judith Guest is indeed a total amateur. At the University of Michigan, where she earned a B.A. in education in 1958, she took no writing courses. "I was intimidated. There were lots of talented people around." Until Ordinary People the only public recognition she had was winning 60th place in a contest of 100 small prizes offered by Writer's Digest for short stories in 1970. Still, she describes herself as a "closet writer" from the age of twelve: "I just didn't talk to anybody about it." She admits to writing "seriously" for six years, has two failed novels still at home, plus a clutter of short stories. "The novels all grew out of stories," she explains, "because I can't seem to abandon the people."

Family Stress. She has never endured a tragedy like the one described in Ordinary People or been to a psychiatrist. But she is fascinated by how individual members of any family handle stress, and she has learned to live through deep bouts of depression, counting on experience and commitment to carry her through. Says she: "That's what the young don't have. That's why a boy like Conrad is so vulnerable." As for guilt: "Everybody's got that."

She has always had a lot of energy and read a great deal, mostly fiction, at a very high rate of speed (sometimes a book a day): "As a reader, I feel I have been assaulted and offended for years by books celebrating the Extraordinary." Hence Ordinary People.

Because she wrote so steadily and on so many manuscripts, her family never thought of Ordinary People as "the book." Her husband, the vice president of a microfilm company, has always supported her writing. One thing she hopes they will now have more time and money for is travel. The other is education. "With three boys to put through college, we always figured that when we got there we'd find a way to do it somehow. Now that's eased a bit." Success, so far, has been no problem. "Let's face it. It's great fun for a while to have people ask you questions and talk about yourself. But after a while with every interview you give away a big chunk of yourself. You could look up one day and find there's nothing left for you. When that happens I'll quit." Not writing, of course. Just giving interviews.

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