Romance Turned Upside Down

By Paul Gray

A MOTHER AND TWO DAUGHTERS by Gail Godwin; Viking; 564 pp.; $15.95

In simpler times, happy stories ended with a marriage proposal or a wedding. A Mother and Two Daughters is decidedly cheerful; but living happily ever after, in the old-fashioned sense, is the very fate its heroines struggle to escape. They find themselves in a romance turned upside down: girl meets boy, boy offers her his hand, she shakes it and marches on.

In four earlier novels and a collection of short stories, Author Gail Godwin, 44, has presented a distinctive gallery of rogues, female, troubled and courageous. They tend to have Southern backgrounds, with all the accompanying luggage of traditions and social forms, and an unsettling inclination to think and act on their own (Godwin was raised in Asheville, N.C., and has taught English and creative writing at Vassar and Columbia, among other places). The author's fifth novel repeats previous patterns on a grander scale: more main characters, broader swatches of life to dazzle and puzzle them.

The catalyst for all that follows is the fatal heart attack of Leonard Strickland, a gentle North Carolina lawyer fond of Montaigne and Cicero. After 40 years of his benign companionship, his widow Nell doubts her ability to go it alone: "He protected me from so much ... from my harshest judgments of myself as well as of others." Strickland's death also catches his two daughters at awkward points in their lives. Cate, headstrong and twice divorced, is approaching her 40th birthday and teaching English at a small college in Iowa; like her previous school in New Hampshire, this one too seems on the verge of closing for lack of funds. And Lydia, the prim younger daughter and mother of two teen-age sons, has just walked out on her banker husband after 18 years of marriage.

None of these problems is unique, of course, in fact or fiction, and Godwin never claims otherwise. She does make the three women who face them singularly interesting. They are all intelligent enough to wish, sometimes, that they were less so. Nell would like to blend comfortably into the extending circle of Southern widows in her town, but her acerbic side keeps her at a slight, disquieting remove. Cate periodically feels the urge to "lapse wearily" into a man's care and then bristles angrily at her own weakness. Lydia tries to organize herself into happiness, knowing that each new accomplishment will set the stage for another bout of worry and planning. Stubbornly, she pursues the dream: "It really did seem to her that she had a chance of getting it all in."

Characters who believe that usually get a rude comeuppance. But Godwin places her women in an extremely amiable world. Their wills are not thwarted, their plans are not crushed by reality. They do not face discrimination or sexism but rather an excess of love from those around them. Cate meets the father of one of her students; he turns out to be a millionaire industrialist who lives in a castle on the banks of the Mississippi River. Before long, he asks her to marry him: "Oh hell, she thought, why couldn't this be the thirteenth century? Then it would all be decided for me." Lydia's tender trap appears in the form of a handsome podiatrist in Winston-Salem. Their lovemaking inspires her to write a term paper on Eros for one of the college courses she is now taking. Lydia discusses the topic with her professor, a Harvard-educated black woman: "I don't know where this sort of thing fits in my life, or whether I can make it fit, or whether I even want it to fit. That's why I'd like to get to the bottom of whatever this thing is."

The notion of winnowing out the dark secret of sex through a college composition is comic. It is also, coming from Lydia at this point, endearing. Godwin's long, leisurely narrative is too inclusive and ingratiating to encourage snap judgments or condemnations. She allows her women to be as naive or foolish as they wish, but she also weighs in the balance the fact that they are striving toward a vision, however unclear. Near the end, she lets them realize most of it. A coda assembles all the surviving characters for a reunion on a North Carolina mountain in the fall of 1984. Nell, Cate and Lydia are happy in ways that they would have chosen, and did in fact choose. The hills are alive with the sound of music.

This idyllic conclusion seems inevitable, given the events that have preceded it. Spurned suitors do not stalk off but remain on call, ready to be helpful whenever the women they love need them. Lydia's sons do not resent the disruptions their mother has imposed on their lives; they remain obedient and promising. When Cate needs a job and a place to live, both appear. Thanks to the dead father and the abandoned banker and the rejected millionaire, there is enough money on tap to keep Nell, Cate and Lydia as comfortable and restless as they could wish.

Such behavior is preposterous, and why not? Despite its abundance of realistic details, A Mother and Two Daughters is at heart an old story in brand-new clothes. This time around, Rochester does not get Jane Eyre; she tells him to keep his distance while she manages the estate. Godwin's version of this turnabout is entertaining and stereoscopic. Her novel can be read as a straightforward account of three plucky women imposing their wills on a receptive world; it can also be seen as a gentle comedy of the unfettered consciousness. Viewed both ways at once, it is engrossing and deep. --By Paul Gray

" Why in God's name did people form families? What made them imprison themselves in the separate pressure cookers referred to as 'nuclear families'? Of course, children didn't form them; children came to consciousness and found themselves already bubbling away in the pot. But then what made these children grow up and start another pressure cooker all their own? . .. First the smug exclusion of all others, of the 'outside world'; then the grim multiplication of oneself and one's partner behind closed doors; then the nauseating, unclean moiling about of all the family members in their 'nuclear' cauldron, bumping against one another, everyone knowing all too well everyone else's worst faults--all of them stewing themselves in one another's juices. "

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