Homebodies

By R.Z Sheppard

ROUGH STRIFE by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Harper & Row; 200 pages; $9.95

Caroline is a mathematician who specializes in topology and knot theory. Husband Ivan is an executive at a New York City museum. He relishes detachment, irony and ambiguity; she favors directness, clarity and definite answers. But Ivan is more demanding than Caroline: "She could forgive a good deal of grossness so long as there was not emotional dishonesty, but he required aesthetic purity and was harsh about lapses in taste. He said that if something was shoddily executed it had unquestionably been shoddily conceived and insufficiently felt. This rigor in him, especially when directed at a well-meaning movie, gave her a sinking, hopeless feeling. Yet she knew that it was so in her own work: everything true and useful proceeded from a clear statement of the premises."

The premise of Lynne Sharon Schwartz's true and useful first novel is that marriage is a form of "unconditional acceptance" and, in Caroline's professional opinion, something that "might be infinitely twisted, tugged and pushed, provided that no shapes were snapped in two, or poked with holes, or forced inside out."

This striking topological analogy also applies to Rough Strife, a brainy, sensuous reshaping of courtly love, romantic cliches, sex stereotypes and many of the truisms that keep two people sleeping, eating and, above all, talking together for most of their lives.

Young Caroline meets Ivan during a Roman holiday in the late 1950s. At 29, he is one of those postwar perennial students, a Fulbright scholar studying the relationship of architecture to the rise and fall of empires. His real talent, he believes, lies elsewhere. "I think," he says to Caroline, "I would be good at telling people how to go about getting what they want. That's if they know what they want to begin with."

At that moment, Caroline wants to get this attractive intellectual to bed. Ivan is in no hurry; he charms and tantalizes her with food, wine and graceful erudition. Rather than toss coins in a fountain, he guides her to the Campidoglio to see the caged she-wolf, symbol of the mythical beast that suckled Romulus and Remus. The animal, "glowering from slate-gray eyes that looked at once treacherous and ready to weep," suddenly howls in their faces.

Eight years after her marriage, Caroline is in obstetrical stirrups being delivered of their first child: "She wasn't supposed to roar, the natural childbirth teacher hadn't mentioned anything about that, she was supposed to breathe and push. But as long as no one seemed to take any notice she might as well keep on, it felt so satisfying and necessary... The sound reminded her of something she had heard long ago."

The point, richly made throughout the novel, is that a perceptive Ivan was drawn to a wildness just beneath Caroline's cool, efficient exterior. She, in turn, understands that Ivan's passionate statements about art and politics cloak a chilly, analytical intelligence. It is this intelligence that ironically gives emotional and physical depth to their marriage.

Ivan may appear a feminist idea of the perfect mate. He does not interfere with Caroline's career or challenge her separateness. When a teaching job takes her away for three months, he stays behind and cooks for their daughter. Yet he is complex, touchy about his freedom, easy to anger and a bit violent. It is assumed that he has an occasional affair. Caroline does too, though her liaisons are never confused with the authentic intimacies of her home life.

Readers looking to rationalize that contradiction in terms of "open marriage" will not find support in this book. Schwartz is too good a writer to build characters out of trendy rhetoric and aggressive self-pity. Her aim is to show how two people in love can reveal each other's nature over a long period of time. They were, writes the author, "hammer and chisel to each other."

This is not a gentle image. Indeed, Schwartz takes her title from Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress:

Let us roll all our Strength and

all

Our sweetness up into one Ball: And tear our Pleasures with rough

strife, Thorough the Iron gates of Life.

It appears she also knows her La Rochefoucauld: "There are good marriages, but no delightful ones."

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