A few years ago, Francine du Plessix Gray's "Divine Disobedience" surveyed radical and libertarian stirrings in the Catholic Church subsequent to Vatican II. Ivan Illich, the Bishop of Cuernavaca, and the Berrigan brothers were among the clerical freedom fighters profiled in this highly intelligent work of personal and investigative reportage. Herself committed to the goal of liberation, Mrs. Gray remained ironically aware of elements of the quixotic and contradictory in the various attempts her book depicted to "make it new" within the confines of one of the most hidebound institutions on earth….

["Lovers and Tyrants,"] a first novel, is also taken up with the tension or dialectic between liberation and confinement, between breaking free from history and discovering where and how one fits into history; but the ground has shifted from the ecclesiastical to the erotic and marital, and much of Mrs. Gray's irony, operating as a sense of rational limits, has either gotten lost or gone so deadpan as to be unnoticeable. This last comment is directed particularly at the final two sections of the novel, "Marriage and Madness" [and "Stephanie"]…. In the first of these we see her heroine Stephanie, a highly educated French-American upper-middle-class woman in her late thirties, blessed with a tender, compliant husband, fine children, satisfying professional work as a writer and college teacher, with practically unlimited access to extra-marital sexual adventures, psychiatric and spiritual counseling, the pleasures of travel and the whole armarium of fashionable psychedelic drugs, slip into madness out of a conviction that her freedom is obstructed….

In the second of these sections we meet Stephanie again, now into her forties, having left home and "gone West" in more senses than one….

There is material here for excellent satire of a type that Aldous Huxley in his heyday could have handled well. But is Francine Gray satirical? Stephanie goes to a show bar in Las Vegas, that ultimate banal trap of American experience, and there is vouchsafed a vision of the androgynous future in the form of a "he/she" with shoulder-length hair and hairy legs wearing a pink tutu and balancing on a high wire. Here the book ends, and it would seem a telling reductio ad absurdum of the exigent heroine's demands for a freedom that becomes ever more meaningless as its scope approaches the limitless. But was it meant to be absurd, or is this Mrs. Gray's vision of the unbridled—and ungroomed—future as well?

The earlier sections where Stephanie is the subject of an absorbing, often brilliantly narrated fictional memoir work much better than the later ones….

In her early thirties Stephanie,… married to her college suitor, makes two trips to France…. The sections dealing with these events are crammed with unforgettably drawn characters, rich emotion and complex social portraiture. In counterpoint they bring out contrasted aspects of French life that are both immemorial and contemporary, and that perhaps only a cultural "amphibian" like Mrs. du Plessix Gray would clearly see. How the same writer who wrote "Tribe" (about the poignant journey to Saint-Seran) could write "Stephanie" dumbfounds my mind. The first is true art written from a depth of lived experience that is virtually unique for any American writer one can name. The second is full of extravagant posturing but is essentially empty as its desert setting.