[In the following review, Grossman examines the narrative structure of Love, Again.]

Doris Lessing has pursued her fictional explorations of sexual passion for a remarkable forty years and more, beginning with her “Martha Quest” novel sequence and the stories collected in The Habit of Loving (1957), and continuing into the present with Love, Again. Her theme now is the erotic vitality of a woman in her sixties, as a reality that defies all cultural bias against its acknowledgment To acknowledge is one thing, however, to value the reality is another, and the words used to signal its emergence here—“a sweet insidious deceptiveness,” and “a poison”—sound a clear warning that trouble rather than fulfillment lies ahead.

But was Lessing ever a liberated celebrant of the body's joy? Looking at reviews of her early work up to and including the groundbreaking The Golden Notebook (1962), I'm struck not just by the old-style references to the author as “Mrs. Lessing,” but by the conservative analogies her talent evoked: in England she was compared to Jane Austen, and in America Mary McGrory found her writing on sexual themes equal in its frank precision to that of John O'Hara. From a present perspective, McGrory and her colleagues seem to have been at least half right. For Lessing's vision has alternated between a fatalistic social realism, in her accounts of women (mostly) trapped at the dead-ends of sexual convention (as in the famous story “To Room Nineteen,” or The Summer before the Dark), and the conviction that sexuality can enable a spiritual transcendence, in her more speculative fictions (for example, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five).

Love, Again marks a conscious return to realist seventy, and harks back even further to the classical idea of love as an endemic fever in the blood—the latter underlined by running allusions to sources from Sappho to Villon and from Byron to Bob Dylan. Lessing's protagonist/victim in the novel is Sarah Durham, one of the “free women” whom Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook had prefigured: a professional writer-producer and founding member of The Green Bird, a distinguished theatrical collective. Long widowed, and sexually quiescent for the past two decades, Sarah at 65 feels herself reawakening. The trigger is her work on a play about the romantic life and death of Julie Vairon, imagined by Lessing as a historical figure of the French fin-de-siècle, a brilliantly gifted quadroon from Martinique—a composer, painter, diarist of her own doomed loves, and finally a suicide.

What draws Sarah first, and announces the theme of a story within a story, is her attraction to Julie's journals and songs, which she begins translating from the French. Then she acquires a collaborator in the stage adaptation of Julie's life story—Stephen, a fiftyish country squire and patron of the arts whose obsession with Julie as the ideal lover has for some years dominated his life. The emotional temperature rises further as Sarah and Stephen's composite script brings together an international cast of performers, in rehearsal for a premiere to be held at Julie's now ruined Provencal collage.

All prove to be charmers, especially the ambitious jeune premier Bill, who flirts with every woman but most desperately, if fraudulently, with Sarah. And though she's prided herself on a mature, sensible immunity to disturbance, in this hothouse atmosphere Bill arouses a response. For Sarah it is at once a late blossoming and a deep humiliation:

The ichors that flooded her body created behind the face of Sarah, the face she and everyone knew, a younger face, that shone out, smiling. Her body was alive and vibrant, but also painful. Her breasts burned, and the lower part of her abdomen ached. Her mouth threatened to seek kisses—like a baby's mouth turning and turning to find the nipple.

I'm sick, she said to herself. “You're sick.”

(p. 186)

Sexual desire, Lessing indicates, was once Sarah's birthright, not a sickness: she had a fulfilling marriage and two children (successfully raised), and experienced herself always as an attractive, proudly sexual woman. Yet sometime in her forties, around the time she renounced an unfaithful partner—as she says to Stephen, “Do you imagine I'd keep a man who wanted someone else?”—she became celibate. Prematurely, it now seems; and we may legitimately raise a question that Lessing leaves dormant—does sexual desire become a sickness precisely when it is driven out, or driven on, by egotistical pride?

Meanwhile Sarah's male alter ego, Stephen, is in deeper trouble yet. The realization of the play Julie Vairon on stage in rehearsal intensifies his hopeless desire for the woman she was: he propositions the first actress to play her part, and has an unsatisfying affair with the second.

In the course of rehearsals, Sarah herself sings for the cast her version of a song to accompany the scene of Julie's desertion by her last lover, Remy. As she sings, she too takes on the magnetic aura of Julie's resurrected life, and her longing to unite sexual love and friendship: “Giving pain is for the lover, / A friend does not a friend betray.” In the wake of this scene Andrew, the actor playing Remy, and Henry, the director, both fall in love with Sarah herself, and desire spreads like an irresistible contagion throughout the ensemble.

I'm reminded here of the success of A. S. Byatt's Possession in showing the revival of sexual romance in the present via contact with Victorian-era sources. Lessing, though a less gifted period ventriloquist, creates the effect she wants with an adroit economy of means. Her Julie is a light sketch compared to Byatt's Christabel LaMotte—but on the other hand, her evocation of the textual Julie doesn't offend me the way Byatt's pastiche of Emily Dickinson's great letters did.

As Julie Vairon reaches its triumphant opening night in Provence, so the passions it has inspired overflow in curiously non-physical expression, with flowers sent and notes passed under doors, or from the hands of hotel porters. In the end, it is Henry who wins Sarah's affections; but Sarah's interpretation of her transferred attachment is hardly enthusiastic:

People carry round with them this weight of longing, usually, thank heavens, well out of sight and “latent”—like an internal bruise?—and then, for no obvious reason, just like that, there he was (who?), and onto him is projected this longing, with love.

(p. 213)

Such a dour acknowledgment of love as need, which makes nothing of the individual quality of the beloved person, promises badly for the outcome. Sarah gives Henry just one renunciatory kiss; he explains that in any case he couldn't risk losing his marriage and his young son.

Anticlimactic? The situation as Lessing's narrative tells it is worse than that, for as the lovers of the older generation burn out slowly or quickly, the younger characters seem wholly incapable of picking up the torch. They are as a group strangely insensitive, either thinking in terms of a casual “good fuck,” or uninterested in the whole business (Sarah's cheerfully healthy nieces), or on the street offering blowjobs for cash (her miserably delinquent niece).

To be turned off by love seems reasonable, after we've heard Sarah's prolonged and repeated outcries echoed virtually word for word by the diary of Stephen's final days that he bequeaths to her: “‘I understand what it means to be ill with love.’ ‘My heart hurts, it hurts. … ’” Yet, Lessing implies, the decline of romantic misery proves destructive for art: Julie Vairon gets transformed by the younger inheritors of The Green Bird into a sentimental Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musical called The Lucky Piece.

There's more than a touch of geezerish resentment here. Sarah herself ends by resuming the painful stoicism she learned as a child rejected by her mother in favor of her younger brother. When she clears out her flat for a batch of visiting grandchildren, we understand that she is in permanent exile from the circle of fulfilled love. And this reminds us that for Lessing, maternity has always represented sacrifice, a break with the enjoyment of love, rather than yet another transmutation of the return to erotic origins: “a child finding itself lifted into longed-for arms.” To insist on this opposition must surely deepen the sadness of age, excluded from the sense of a redeeming caritas.