Sexual Detente THE TRUTH ABOUT LORIN JONES

By John Skow

"Polly Alter used to like men, but she didn't trust them anymore, or have very much to do with them." Is Polly anyone we know? Of course she is. This first line of Alison Lurie's eighth novel may not rank with "Call me Ishmael," but it fits an age in which communication between the sexes sometimes seems to be conducted solely through therapists and lawyers. Thus Lurie, whose The War Between the Tates (1974) was a notably witty account of sexual skirmishing, labels her new book as the trendiest of problem novels.

But does Polly, a fortyish art historian at work on a biography of a brilliant, little-known woman painter named Lorin Jones, really have a problem? Polly's women friends don't think so. Most of them are solitaries of one sort or another, and they warmly support her isolation. She is well shed, they feel, of her first husband, a medical researcher who, a few years before, with typical male arrogance, left Manhattan for a job in Denver, forcing Polly to choose between marriage and her museum job. Her only difficulty, in this view, is that their delightful 13-year-old son, who lives with her, is being transformed by puberty into a male animal, and thus an enemy.

Lurie, however, tips her hand, perhaps too early in the book, in the direction of heterosexual detente. The ex-husband, now remarried, is sketched as a decent fellow. Polly's closest friend, a cozy, catlike lesbian named Jeanne, shows herself, in the book's best characterization, to be malicious and totally self-absorbed. Most important, Polly's research, which she and her friends assume will prove that Painter Jones was abused and underrated by the men in her life, goes awkwardly sour. It turns out that Jones was indeed a genius but that she was far harder on men than they were on her.

Unfortunately, the revelations about Jones are not monstrous enough (she was erratic mentally and took drugs) to disguise the real intent of the novel's rather soapy second half: to find a nice, sexy, feminist man for Polly. Why is this soapy? Because the author misplaces the fine edge of irony with which she described the lesbian Jeanne. Her tone becomes ever so slightly earnest. And earnest, in the writing of social comedy, is what it is very important not to be.