[In the following review, Bick assesses the sexual dimension of Love, Again.]

Lessing's latest novel [Love, Again] deserves applause for its frank depiction of its older, female protagonist's resurgent sexuality, while individual passages must be questioned for prose as turgid as the title.

Sarah Durham has collaborated with Stephen Ellington-Smith to produce an “entertainment” based on the life of Julie Vairons, a 19th-century mulatto who painted and composed music. Living alone, Vairons was regarded by the French villagers as licentious and perhaps a witch. Even her death was shrouded in mystery: was it accident, suicide, or murder?

The novel's huge array of characters are involved in staging this drama; Sarah imagines having sex with many of them. The identity of these putative lovers blurs, while Julie threatens to take over the novel. Lessing appears aware of this problem, but the use of parenthetical names to identify the various “he's” solves nothing. Other problems include such overwritten lines as “anger growing like a fat unstoppable cancer” and “Love is hot and wet, but it does not scald and sting.” References to AIDS seem self-conscious, as does the mention of particular sexual acts.

Lessing attempts to show the importance of work in a woman's life, certainly a commendable goal even today, when the heroine's work often appears to be an authorial afterthought. Unfortunately, Sarah's work gets lost in Lessing's concentration on her sexuality. Has Lessing undertaken an impossible task? In any case, one returns with pleasure to the subtle depiction of older protagonists in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Sackville-West's All Passion Spent.