Double Image Group Sex

By Martha Duffy

The title is enough to make you weep. This is not an erotic manual or a behavioral study, nor is it a blue novel. A slight but charming romantic comedy is imprisoned here, shut off by an oafish handle from its natural audience of fairly sophisticated fiction readers and gift givers.

Group Sex is about the improbable romance between Frances Girard, who is a young editor at a New York City publishing house and a lady; and Paul Treat, a steam-headed avant-garde stage director who is definitely no gentleman. Treat is known for his manhandling of the classics -- Peer Gynt performed on stilts, As You Like It featuring seals. Before long he has Frances believing that stilts rescue Ibsen and that seals are ideal companions for Shakespeare's lovers. He also has her playing dubious "primal scenes" -- one is called "Rudolf and Mary," about the suicide pact at Mayerling -- repeated interminably until they become ordeals.

Why does Frances put up with this? Although she often shows real gumption, she considers herself one of life's supporting players. "Creative people pay a heavy price" is Frances' belief, and as editor and lover, she "had put herself in the service of such people. Perhaps she had done so because she wished to be more like them, although she knew she belonged to another, lesser species, the race of people who answer their phones and fold the bath towels." Like modern folk everywhere, she also yearns for meaning in life, or at least an organizing principle, and Paul's ego is big enough to provide it, "to make life cohere, like art."

The novel reads like a breeze, and its strength is Arensberg's spoofing of two ostensibly glamorous worlds, publishing and theater. The author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute to his washboard midriff . . . Saul Bellow had bipped him on the arm to test his biceps. William Styron, who was balding, had tugged at Allan's thick brown hair."

In Paul Treat's milieu, Allan would be a very small paper tiger indeed. Actors live in a vivid, generous, but to Frances, dangerous world. "Paul had two main voices," she notes, "one for pleading and one for threats." In fact, as she finally realizes, behind all the bravado, the lighted-up codpieces in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the sadomasochistic improvisations, Paul is dedicated to the pursuit of money for his productions, and he is totally unprincipled in his methods. It seems that he really does love Frances -- or so the improbable happy ending would indicate -- but let him spy a rich woman, and true love is quickly forgotten.

Arensberg's first novel, Sister Wolf (1980), was a darker work of spooky psychological chill. If Group Sex is slightly less successful, the reason is that Frances is not quite clearly drawn. At one point we are told that she never blushes, but she already has, on an earlier page. There are in fact two Franceses, and only one of them blushes. The other one, spunky and with a rich sense of irony, is too smart to fall for a one-man traveling circus like Paul Treat. But comedy is a tough taskmaster, and it seems that Arensberg, like her heroine, settles for a prayer to St. Francis de Sales, who protects editors.