SOURCE: "Guilty Pleasures: The Fiction of Laurie Colwin," in New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. 13, Nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer, 1991, pp. 296-309.

"As for the book, it's no good writing about the upper classes if you hope to be taken seriously. You must have noticed that by now? Station masters, my dear, station masters."

"I know, I know. Of course, I have noticed. But you see my trouble is that I loathe station masters, like hell I do…."

          —Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding

Laurie Colwin occupies an odd position among American fiction writers. Like Ellen Gilchrist, she takes as her subject romantic love; like Alice Adams, she keeps to upper-class people located in comfortable places. Her prose is both elegant and witty, and at first her work gives the appearance of light fiction, no more. Yet something more seems to be going on. A glance over past reviews of her work finds uneasiness among the critics; one remarked that the depiction of so much easy happiness left the reader feeling vaguely unhappy. Has this been intentional all along? In her latest novel, Goodbye Without Leaving, is Colwin finally tipping part of her hand?

Complex currents of guilt beset the critical reader's pleasure in Colwin's text. We expect serious fiction to be openly class-conscious; the socially conscientious reader, however bourgeois, is looking for stories that at least problematize the bourgeois experience, or, even better, locate themselves entirely outside it. And we have become accustomed, these days, to a minimalist style that eschews the figures of rhetoric, describing bleak scenes in bleak sentences. It is ironic that Colwin's protagonists—academics, artists, products of good schools—are also the kind of women who read her books; yet these women, reading Colwin, meet guilt on all sides, as if they were eating chocolate instead of sprouts. The style is delicious, the settings are pleasant, the people are totally recognizable. These are stories about people you know. And, for the heterosexual reader, the assessments of heterosexual romance are equally recognizable, formulations that can be taken home and used; these are stories about yourself. How can this be great art?

Recent work on the romance has broached the possibility that even the popular fiction of women may be worth taking seriously. The fact that an author's work is restricted in setting, that it is pleasurable to read, even that it is comic, need not banish it from the critic's consideration. Moreover, a set of interrelated problems in Colwin's work suggests to me that she is producing more than a sort of fiction version of The Preppy Handbook (another product of a nice Jewish girl among WASPs). In Goodbye Without Leaving, this set of problems is writ large. First, the heroine is an assimilated Jew struggling to find her cultural identity; previous Colwin heroines have been happy being assimilated. But, where Colwin now problematizes happiness and Jewishness, she has always problematized happiness before; romance for her is not easy, however beautiful it may be; and she has often mediated on the artificiality of beauty itself. Her work is full of the pleasure of the romance plot, but it is also posted with signs calling this pleasure into question.

I write this as Colwin's ideal reader: a nice assimilated Jewish girl with a nice academic job and a lot of nice friends who went to good schools, always in and out of love. I would like to believe that the pleasure I have in Colwin's texts tallies with some kind of artistic merit, and I'm betting on the connections I've sketched above. I'll try to convince you, and myself at the same time, for the truth is that the whole thing makes me feel guilty. But maybe that just jibes with the widespread critical uneasiness I noted above; we all know we're not supposed to be happy all the time. And maybe that's the point.

Colwin's writing has always been marked by a high degree of wish-fulfillment in the plot line, and Goodbye Without Leaving must be the most extreme example. The heroine, Geraldine Coleshares, from a cultured and assimilated Jewish family, starts out as a bored graduate student in English literature at the University of Chicago, whose true passion is for black rock and roll. She haunts the (mostly black) clubs of Chicago, and shortly finds herself as a backup singer and dancer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely—as "the white Shakette." Her mentor gets her her first job with the introduction, "Here's a boss white chick who knows all your routines and she can move." Talk about bald-faced fantasy!

The two years that Geraldine goes on to spend touring with Vernon and Ruby prove to be the high point of her life; everything that follows is anticlimactic. Subsequent events include her marriage to a nice young lawyer from an assimilated Jewish family (Southern), who also loves rock and roll; the birth of their son, Little Franklin; a job at the Race Music Foundation, where Geraldine does research on female blues singers; and a job at the Hansonia Society, where Geraldine does further research, this time on the musicological endeavors of two Austrian Jewish expatriates who collected black music in the American South in the 1930's. Here she has the occasion to meet many Holocaust survivors, with one of whom she has an affair. But the significant thing about this final part of the book is that she begins to recover her roots, signs up for Hebrew lessons, and conducts her first Seder. Her cultural rootlessness has been a theme throughout the book; both as an American among Europeans and as an assimilated Jew among Christians, she feels a deep lack.

The experienced Colwin reader instantly recognizes many of the features of this book: good fortune for all characters, verging on magical realism; settings of equally unreal beauty, in terms of weather, domestic appointments, seasons; and a continuous metanarrative discussion of the problems of human happiness, change, time, nostalgia. These contents are packaged in a style of great rhetorical polish, intensely pleasurable to read. It seems worth considering here how these elements are interrelated and how they are connected with the Jewish question.

An old boyfriend of mine, a Northfield Mt. Hermon graduate then rowing on the Yale crew, used to describe himself as a WASH—a White Anglo-Saxon Hebrew. This is the culture in which Laurie Colwin has always set her work, and Goodbye Without Leaving is no exception. What is exceptional here is that, for the first time, she has written about Jewish assimilation as a problem rather than as an enviable blessing.

Geraldine Coleshares takes her place among a whole parade of similar Colwin protagonists. First to appear is Amelia ("Misty") Berkowitz, in two stories in Passion and Affect that form the basis for the novel Happy All The Time. The difference in cultural background between Misty and her beau, Vincent Cardworthy, is not made much of in the stories, but it looms in the novel, and the terms of the problem are set already in the stories: not just the problem of being an assimilated Jew, but the problem of being an assimilated Jewish young woman who loves and/or marries an upper-class WASP young man. Misty has colleagues already in Passion and Affect: probably Mary Leibnitz, who, in "Animal Behavior," falls in love with Raiford Phelps, known as Roddy; probably Jane Catherine Jacoby, in "Imelda," who (more exotically) has a boyfriend named Tito Ricardo-Ruiz, "an upper-class Argentinian whose father was with the embassy."

A more extreme example is the heroine of Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object—"the little Marcus girl, Elizabeth Olive, nicknamed Olly" (many Colwin characters have prep-style nicknames). Olly marries into a family of New England WASPs right out of John P. Marquand; she dispenses with this problem early in the story: "my mother wondered if the Baxes would mind having Jews in the family, but they didn't care one way or the other." Misty, Mary, Jane Catherine, and Olly are joined in The Lone Pilgrim by Jane Mayer ("The Boyish Lover"), Elizabeth Leopold ("An Old-Fashioned Story"), Georgia Levy ("Delia's Father"), Rachel Manheim ("The Smile Beneath the Smile"), and Polly Solo-Miller ("Family Happiness"), who is also the protagonist of the novel Family Happiness. Rachel has her heart broken by a wealthy mathematician named Andrew Dilks. The Manhattan schoolgirl Georgia Levy describes her culture: "We came from good Jewish and Episcopalian families, and we grew up all alike" (The Lone Pilgrim).

The pleasure-loving English professor Jane Mayer has her heart broken by a physics professor named Arthur Corthauld Spaacks, known as Cordy, who comes from a wealthy but frozen New England WASP family, and the problem the story raises is precisely that of the clash between their cultures:

The Mayers were a family of watered-down German and Dutch Jews who had once had a lot of money. Now they had things. They had Persian rugs, English silver, Limoges plates, and Meissen soup tureens. It was from Cordy that Jane learned the lesson so valuable to the haute bourgeoisie: that some people have a good deal of money and almost nothing else.

The things that the Mayers have go along with an ability to take pleasure in life; Cordy takes pleasure in depriving himself of good things, both material and spiritual (i.e., love). It is strongly suggested here that such an attitude is culturally determined; Jane yearns for Cordy nonetheless.

The consummate description of a Colwin heroine's family is that of Polly Solo-Miller. Here they are in the story "Family Happiness".

They gathered … on New Year's Day, on Christmas Eve as well as Easter Sunday. They were an old, old Jewish family of the sort that is more identifiably old American than Jewish. They gathered at Passover but not at Chanukah, and they went to synagogue twice a year on the two High Holy days. On Yom Kippur they did not fast but had family lunch in the afternoon. [Oy.]

In the novel, this is modified startlingly:

Both [Polly's parents] were of old, old Jewish families, the sort that are more identifiably old American than Jewish. Solo-Millers and Hendrickses had come from Holland via Spain before the American Revolution, which they had either taken part in or helped to raise money for. (Family Happiness)

Presumably Polly belongs to the D.A.R.

There is an insistence throughout on two things: first, the identity in class status between the Jewish women's families and the WASP families into which they travel. Why make the Solo-Millers Jewish at all? Maybe that's just who Colwin writes about, as Hemingway wrote about white boys from the Midwest. But there does seem to be a subliminal voice here, and what it seems to be saying is, "See? There are Jews who don't look like Jews at all." Second, and connected: the non-problematic nature of the alliances between Jews and WASPs. Anti-Semitism just does not exist in these stories; this is all the more ironic considering that Colwin has chosen to write about one culture for which the exclusion of Jews has often been self-defining.

It is not that Colwin never recognizes the problem; it lurks in the background of Happy All the Time. Misty fights off Vincent's declarations of love, suggesting he might be happier with "someone who knows her way around a sailboat."

"And besides that, there's the Jewish question," said Misty. "Oh, that," said Vincent. "I don't notice either of us being religious. Besides, my Aunt Marcia is Jewish. She married Uncle Walter. She's everybody's favorite relative. What's the big deal?"

Vincent's turns out to be the correct reading of the situation; everything works out perfectly, and Aunt Marcia sends them a Haggadah as a wedding present. But throughout the book, Misty remains pessimistic:

In the real world, Misty knew, people like Walter Cardworthy and Fritz Berkowitz waged social warfare. In the real world, when people like Misty and Vincent got married their parents were horrified and tried to stop the wedding…. Living with Vincent made Misty realize that she had spent a good deal of her life ready to ward off some terrible low blow.

The worst the text presents her with is a woman who knows her way around a sailboat, who makes her jealous: "Misty wore on her face an expression that Vincent called 'the only Jew at the dinner table look.'"

Yet Misty is hardly a Chassid. Like the other Colwin heroines, she is a Jew who resembles a familiar WASP type, her ancestors having been homesteaders rather than colonial fund-raisers. Her great-grandfather emigrated from Russia and wound up with a dairy farm in Medicine Stone, Wisconsin, and "[her] father and her Uncle Bernie were grandsons of the pioneers." Misty's family leans left and her father is a labor lawyer, but he gets along fine with Vincent's father, of Petrie, Connecticut—i.e., the Berkowitzes are Jewish, but they fit in. It thus jars slightly when we read that "Uncle Bernie said that when he wrote his autobiography he would call it Jew Boy of the Prairie." Somehow, despite all the happy assimilation, Misty feels alone at the dinner table as Uncle Bernie was alone on the prairie. Both feelings are turned into jokes, but persist nonetheless.

It is in this context (extreme but faintly uneasy assimilation) that we arrive at Goodbye Without Leaving and read Geraldine's explanation of why hymn singing always makes her cry:

My parents were relentlessly secular. They believed that to be American was quite enough. Ethnic identity was slightly vulgar in my mother's eyes, or, at best, a kind of colorful peasant tradition. I had no church to go to. My father's mother had been a Jew from an old family that had intermarried until there was nothing much of anything left except a tree at Christmas time. We had some aunts on my mother's side—this side was of a Judaism so reformed that it was indistinguishable from, say, the Girl Scouts—who held the traditional Passover meal, but no one in living memory celebrated anything silly like Hanukkah. On the High Holy Days my mother dragged my father off to the local reformed synagogue, where the rabbi had a phony English accent and repeatedly intoned in his sermons that Jews were really nothing more than good Americans.

The attitude of Geraldine's mother, and of the rabbi, seems not much different from that of Colwin's own narrative voice in her earlier work, and is at bottom internalized anti-Semitism—which Geraldine here rejects. Can she turn a reclamation of Judaism for herself into a positive version of her endless longing for a lost past? Can she use it to claim a place at the dinner table? Can she find true happiness?

The problem of happiness and change is a leitmotif in Colwin's work. It shows up even in her titles—Family Happiness, Happy All the Time; these, especially the second, have always given me pause for thought. Is it possible to be happy all the time? This isn't really such a dumb question; this is the story of Solon and Croesus as told by Croesus. Colwin's characters often in fact are not happy, but angst-ridden, and this is certainly true of Geraldine Coleshares, whose two years of perfect happiness as a Shakette seem to have made it impossible for her ever to be truly happy again. The contrast between the external circumstances of Geraldine and the rest, and their internal misery, is striking. It is as if Colwin were running a controlled experiment: Iet all circumstances except X be perfect—then what happens?

Again, it is Happy All the Time that provides the most clues to what is going on, and strongly suggests a tie between the Jewish question and the problem of happiness:

"Life is never smooth to the great-granddaughter of tin peddlers who were kicked out of Russia," said Misty. "It's no accident that all my family is in one embattled profession or another. We're just waiting for the Cossacks to come back. When the Cossacks come to Connecticut, you'll understand."

Suddenly we are on familiar ground—Woody Allen territory. Maybe the issue is not (just) whether anyone can be happy, but whether a Jew can be happy, and where. The horrible WASP family dinner in Annie Hall rises before our eyes.

Colwin's characters stage an endless debate on the question of whether happiness is possible, for whom, for how long. Pairs of characters square off; Happy All the Time in fact concerns two pairs, Misty (pessimist) vs. Vincent (optimist), plus Guido, Vincent's cousin (pessimist) vs. his wife Holly (a kind of Zen optimist). The book ends with this well-balanced quadrille toasting "a truly wonderful life"; but it is hard for the reader not to remember Misty's conviction that a blow may fall. In "A Mythological Subject," in The Lone Pilgrim, the narrator (a pragmatic optimist) observes her puritanical cousin, the ironically-named Nellie Felix. Some characters need no interlocutor: Roddy Phelps in "Animal Behavior" breaks Mary Leibnitz' heart just because it's time for him to do it; Max Waltzer, in the Cheeveresque "The Water Rats" (Passion and Affect) sinks into madness as he broods over the perfection of his family life, and begins to lose it by holding it too tightly.

One of the main things that blocks Geraldine's happiness is a kind of nostalgia; for other Colwin characters, it works both over time and over the space between people, as with lovers who begrudge their beloveds the separation of sleep and dreams. Billy in "Sentimental Memory" (The Lone Pilgrim) says to the narrator: "I hate it that we live from one minute to the next. I want to keep everything. I don't want the minutes to fly away. I want to keep every second intact in my mind." The two schoolgirls in "Imelda" muse over the fact that their present will one day be their past; Jane Catherine differentiates herself from her boyfriend on this issue:

"… He doesn't have any sentimental memory. When I think that a day is over and will never repeat, I get all ropy inside, but Tito thinks that life is a string that pulls you along." (Passion and Affect)

These themes figure prominently in Goodbye Without Leaving, the title of which encapsulates them. Geraldine is caught up in a literal nostalgia—a longing for return home; but it is compounded by her feeling that she has no home. She feels out of place in graduate school; while on tour as the white Shakette, she develops a crush on one of the black musicians, Doo-Wah Banks, who kindly turns her down; she rejects her parents; she fights off her marriage, drags her heels over having a wedding, moving to a grown-up apartment, having a baby. She feels most out of place at the dinners of her husband's law-firm friends—now not the only Jew but the only bopper at the dinner table. She cannot think of a career for herself (although, a true Colwin heroine, she lucks into two perfect jobs with a total of three contacts), and refuses all encouragement to return to singing, for which she is assured on all sides she has great talent. One reason that she gives is that she agrees with her boss at the Race Music Foundation that black music should not be co-opted by white singers: "I love this music with all my heart but I don't honestly believe it's mine to sing." She finds her first happiness after leaving the tour with her job there in Harlem, where she is both doing something she loves and also marginal; marginality seems to be her true metier.

This shows up most painfully in her longing for her own past, both personal and cultural. When she first meets Johnny, she says she will always be a Shakette. "Even when you're fifty?" he asks her. "I don't like to think about the future," she replies. (She here echoes an earlier Colwin heroine, Ann Speizer in "The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing," who has a grim vision of herself as a fifty-year-old pothead.) Married to Johnny and musing over the old days, she reflects that the days of the girl groups are over: "Like an exile, I knew that I could never return to the home of my childhood." She explains to Johnny that the loss of her old self is just like the loss she feels in watching their baby turn into a little boy. But it also resembles her sense of lost culture: "I'm nothing," she says to Doo-Wah, "I'm a lapsed Jew from an assimilated family. I don't belong anywhere." As she begins her quest to practice as a Jew, she feels "spiritual longings as well as some desire for a historical context." At the Hansonia Society, she likens her new co-workers to the blacks at the Race Music Foundation: "They were all from a world I had never known and to which I had only the most minimal access." And when she finally finds her niche at the Hansonia Society, she measures her own sense of exile against the experience of real refugees; she calls her lover Leo Rhinehart "the man from Western Civ."—"He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt."

This longing for what you cannot have lies at the center of everything for Colwin: romantic love, of which adultery is thus the epitome; life, which moves us inexorably away from the golden present. In Happy All the Time, Guido loves Holly and constantly cannot have her; her periodic retreats are only a physical expression of the true relationship between them. Two of the men in The Lone Pilgrim—Cordy Spaacks of "The Boyish Lover" and Andrew Dilks of "The Smile Beneath the Smile"—take pleasure in depriving themselves of what they love, while their hedonistic beloveds suffer. Rachel recites "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek" to Andrew. This poignantly beautiful mechanics seems, in Colwin, also to underlie difference itself: man vs. woman, and (implicitly) Jew vs. WASP, black vs. white.

The fact that romantic love is Colwin's subject is almost too obvious to mention, and yet the structure of romantic love—yearning, almost incapable of satisfaction—is a perfect example of Colwin's mechanics. Polly Rice, in "The Lone Pilgrim," draws her illustrations for a deluxe edition of The Art of Courtly Love while longing for a lost lover who is far away in Greenland. An astronomer, he has a galaxy named after him, and she periodically looks up at the stars to try to spot it (she cannot). She works to the accompaniment of the Everly Brothers singing "Sleepless Nights," and a record of country hymns that includes one called "The Lone Pilgrim," in which a dead man sends a message to his loved ones. This overdetermined heap of separations is typical of Colwin's stories; when Geraldine in Goodbye Without Leaving longs for her own youth, the glory days of rock and roll, the babyhood of her little boy, a black man, a European culture she has never known, a sense of purpose in life, and religious faith, her yearning is the helpless longing familiar from Colwin's earlier work.

It is in this context that we can locate Colwin's obsession with adultery. Joyce Carol Oates, in a review of The Lone Pilgrim, singled out as odd what must be one of Colwin's most striking formulations of her creed: "falling in love outside of marriage is the ultimate and every other gesture is its shadow" (from "A Mythological Subject"). Adulterous love recurs throughout Colwin's work: it is the main subject of Family Happiness (which we thus see to be ironically named) and of Another Marvelous Thing, while in Shine On Olly first has an affair with her deceased husband's brother and then cheats on him with a married cellist. Adultery crops up in "The Elite Viewer" and in "Children, Dogs, and Desperate Men" (Passion and Affect), and in "Sentimental Memory," "Intimacy," "Delia's Father," "A Mythological Subject," and "Family Happiness" (The Lone Pilgrim). In most of these cases, the extramarital passion acts to confirm the strength of the couple's marriage, provides a deeper love unavailable within the marriage without threatening the marriage or degrading it, and/or simply offers another pleasure in life's buffet. Geraldine's perfunctory affair with Leo in Goodbye Without Leaving is Colwin's nod to a habit she seems to be leaving behind—obligatory adultery.

But why does she call love outside marriage "the ultimate"? Colwin has a penchant for presenting her characters with significantly-titled books; we recall that Polly Rice, of the title story in The Lone Pilgrim, was illustrating The Art of Courtly Love (a "deluxe edition," mind you). And adultery is the sine qua non of courtly love—a love also set among lords and ladies, people with fancy manners. So Colwin is tapping into a traditional connection between class, behavior, and emotion. It suits her own themes, though; love without marriage provides the best example of love with separation. Even when the love is consummated, honorable lovers cannot be truly happy.

The anguish of such a lover is the theme of "A Mythological Subject," which ends with the narrator watching her troubled cousin sleep:

What a pleasant circumstance to sit in a warm, comfortable room on an icy winter's day and contemplate someone you love whose life has always been of the greatest interest to you. Procris in the painting [of Procris slain by Cephalus] is half naked, but Nellie looked just as vulnerable. It would be exceedingly interesting to see what happened to her, but then she had always been a pleasure to watch. (The Lone Pilgrim)

This passage combines Colwin's most important themes. The opening words, "What a pleasant circumstance," surely call into question the meaning of "pleasant." The narrator is Nellie's friend, yet she watches her with an almost cruel detachment. The distance between the two of them is like the distance between the warm room and the ice outside. The narrator (as now and again happens in Colwin) is consciously enjoying turning a lover into a work of art, in this case a dead woman in a painting. It seems to me to be at least possible that the dislocation of the assimilated Jew is the founding paradigm for the painful distance between the unnamed narrator and Nellie Felix.

One thing that makes Colwin's texts interesting is the sort of self-consciousness manifested by the passage just quoted. Her texts are about the intersection of pleasure with romance, and comment as they go on the aesthetic satisfaction of romantic pain—the beauty of longing. The Lone Pilgrim contains three brilliant stories on this theme: "A Girl Skating," a meditation on the male gaze from the point of view of its object; "A Mythological Subject"; and "The Smile Beneath the Smile," in which female bystanders admire the visual effect of a couple tormented by romantic longing. The metanarrative in "The Smile Beneath the Smile" comments:

It is no accident that love finds expression in poetry. Love has nothing to do with personality. It has to do with form. Translate this into emotional terms … and you find that romantic love has nothing to do with content … It only has to do with love.

This, I think, does a good deal to explain the highly marked aesthetic effect of a Colwin story. Her texts insist on beauty in surroundings, both in domestic interiors and in weather. The effect, on me at least, is a powerful nostalgia mixed with uneasiness. This is the same glossy, armored beauty David Lynch achieved in Blue Velvet. It looks normal, perfectly so; yet its inhabitants are often filled with pain and longing. It seems to me that Colwin is intentionally setting up an environment for her characters in a painterly way, and that the effect has something to do with effects like that created by the title of Happy All the Time. Colwin has a little joke with the reader when she picks a title for the dissertation of Harry Markham (who, in "The Big Plum," sits and gazes longingly at a checkout girl in his supermarket); his dissertation is called Vermeer and the Art of the Impossible (Passion and Affect).

Certainly there is a good deal of the glossy impossible in Goodbye Without Leaving. Colwin diverts her energy from the usual weather effects and pretty interiors to pull off two tours de force of beautification: of the experience of American blacks and of the Holocaust.

The black experience in Goodbye Without Leaving is a far cry from Toni Morrison, or even Andrea Lee. Race prejudice is as removed from Colwin's world as anti-Semitism; drugs in the music business are turned into a running joke. Vernon and Ruby Shakely make a tame version of Ike and Tina Turner, with only vague hints that Vernon is not a nice fellow. All of Geraldine's former colleagues on the tour prosper; she runs into her fellow Shakette Grace at a fancy dinner party which Grace is catering. Doo-Wah Banks is putting his children through college when last seen. Most striking is Geraldine's first view of the Race Music Foundation: "housed in an old brownstone on one of Harlem's nicer streets." In a whole novel set in Manhattan, Geraldine hardly sees an unpleasant sight; she is once "almost mugged" near her old apartment, but she is rescued by her kindly Ukrainian neighbors. On her return to the Race Music Foundation after a three-year hiatus she does notice that the subway station exit looks worse, but the Foundation "looked positively rich." And Geraldine's first view of the neighborhood to which she is to move with Johnny, and which represents to her an uncomfortable degree of bourgeois solidity, includes the following vignette: "a handsome black woman took a wooden basket of apples out of the back of her station wagon"; now the blacks look like WASPs. It is almost incredible that this book is contemporary with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities; this is not New York as we know it. It's quite a trick to plunk your nice Jewish assimilated heroine down in Harlem as a switch on the Merion Cricket Club and have everything come out about the same.

The Holocaust survivors who populate the Hansonia Society also thrive. Colwin lavishes attention on their elegant clothing and food, both of which are frequent topics of discussion at the office. Geraldine has a chat with Hannah Hausknecht, the accountant, who tells about shopping at Saks and seeing there her best friend's aunt, who she had not known was still alive. As they talk Geraldine suddenly notices the tattooed number on Hannah's arm, and Hannah explains that she was in Auschwitz:

"I will tell you something. I only remember the good times. I was in the children's section and it was near the end of the war. We made up songs about cakes…. But look!" she said. "I have grown up so plump and happy."

Later Geraldine makes another friend, Mrs. Hornung, who gets Geraldine into her special private swim club, where other refugees cheerily meet to swim and gossip:

They had had everything taken away from them: their language, their landscape, their sense of stability, and here they were, greeting each other happily …, complaining about their hairdressers or dentists or stockbrokers, comparing the prices of shoes at Saks Fifth Avenue….

During Geraldine's whole time at the Hansonia Society, delving into records of research in the rural South during the 1930's, the narrative never so much as mentions the Depression.

Considering that some have wondered whether there can be art after Auschwitz, it is a bit breathtaking to have this drawing-room comedy. Yet it seems to me that Colwin is not falsifying human experience. Frivolous, cheerful people went into Auschwitz, and some of them came out. That there should be a continuity of cakes and ale is a sort of miracle, and a joyous one. Toward the end of the novel, and her final decision that perhaps she will sing again, Geraldine swims laps and remembers herself singing her first solo as a Shakette: "I thought of Hannah Hausknecht, who had described sitting on the steps of the children's barracks at Auschwitz singing: Was müssen das für Bäume sein / Wo die grossen Elephanten spatzieren gehen / Ohne anzustossen." The image of the little girl, who would someday turn into the lady in the Saks Fifth Avenue suit, sitting on the steps at Auschwitz singing a children's nonsense song, makes a serious statement about the place of silly cheerfulness in the face of the worst evil.

Music holds a special place in the hearts of those who grew up in the sixties. Rock and roll, as Bob Seger sings, never forgets. Geraldine Coleshares is not the first Colwin heroine to be haunted by tunes; Patricia Burr in "A Road in Indiana" (Passion and Affect) leaves her husband, prompted by a country and western album called Closing Doors. Jane Catherine Jacoby, in "Imelda," who has a yen for Latin music along with her Argentinian boyfriend, is moved to tears by the music of Graucho Pacheco's Latin Band at the Bronx Music Palace. Polly Rice, in "The Lone Pilgrim," sees music as a Proustian key to each person's private past: "It makes your past come back to you, and if you must pinpoint a moment in your life you can say, 'That was when "He's a Rebel," by the Crystals, was a hit.'" The kind of feeling for rock and roll that Geraldine has is immediately recognizable to a reader who lived through that time, and the feeling of outright, ecstatic joy produced by bopping always strikes me as one of the few metaphysical experiences available to ordinary people.

So it makes sense that, for Geraldine, the only pure experience is what she feels as a backup singer. For a person without a deeply felt religion, what could be more celebratory? Geraldine's best friend, Mary Abbott, a devout Catholic, several times compares her to a pilgrim, and says that being a Shakette (a female Shaker?) was not unlike being a nun—a form of pure being. Mary Abbott (appropriately named) knows this, because in the course of the novel she actually becomes a nun, in a Benedictine order; this caps a recurring appearance in Colwin's work of the Rule of St. Benedict (Holly reads it in Happy All the Time, as does the narrator of "St. Anthony of the Desert" [The Lone Pilgrim]). Geraldine knows this, too; she describes her feelings as Ruby sings her bravura number, "Jump for Joy": "The kind of ecstasy people find in religion, I found in being a Shakette. It was not an out-of-body experience, it was an in-body experience" (Goodbye Without Leaving).

In fact, in this book, rock and roll is what really comes off well as a religious experience. The scene that sticks in my mind takes place when Geraldine has gone to one of her loved haunts, an out-of-print record store near the Race Music Foundation, run by a zombie-like white rock aficionado named Fred Wood. She asks him for a record, which he produces and puts on the turntable:

Bob and Earl were of the gospel-inspired school of rock and roll. As the first notes rolled over us, we froze…. The opening had heavy gospel riffs on piano and shadow guitar. I felt my hair stand on end. When it was over, a tear slid down Fred Wood's cheek. He took the record off the turntable with great tenderness and slipped it into its little paper jacket.

"It's really beautiful," I said.

"Oh, yes," said Fred Wood. He removed the dead cigarette from the corner of his mouth. He gave me the record in a used bag. "It is awesome."

What makes these white people freeze and cry? What does "beautiful" mean here? It helps to see it glossed by "awesome" rather than "pleasant." The song—"gospel-inspired"—is about love that you feel "Deep Down Inside." Though Colwin never uses the term "soul music" in Goodbye Without Leaving, maybe that is what Geraldine is looking for. In this book, almost everyone yearns: whites for blacks, Europeans for Americans, Americans for Europeans, humans for God, men for women, women for men and children. Music and all beauty are simply the expression of that yearning.

I have been a reader of Colwin's for a long time, and have often asked myself why I take her so seriously when her writing is, on the face of it, so unserious. Perhaps her concern has been, all along, with immanence and the problems it poses. Most people seek beauty, admit it as a positive good; and, in love, we seek the beautiful we bring into being in another by our very gaze. Colwin superimposes her hyper-real world of the Vermeer interior onto the ashcan reality more customarily seen in art today, and I think that by so doing she provides a meditation on the nature of art and love.

Or maybe I just take her seriously because I recognize my own experience on her pages. When Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, says she finds history dull because you never see a woman, page after page, this is part Austen's vindication of the novel form—her own form. As a classicist, I deal with a tradition from which almost every woman's voice has been expunged. It is enlightening to read Ovid's Ars Amatoria, but how nice it would be to have more of Sulpicia's poems to go along with it. In two thousand years, I hope that, if John Cheever is still around, Laurie Colwin is there, too.

But it is thought-provoking that the elision of the unpleasant in Colwin's work stands in this same honorable tradition in English literature; another little joke of hers in the title of Geraldine's projected dissertation, Jane Austen and the War of the Sexes (Goodbye Without Leaving). Colwin's world is also the drawing-room world of English domestic comedy. In the epigraph to this essay, one of Nancy Mitford's characters, the upper-class ex-prostitute Amabelle Fortescue, tells the young writer Paul Fotheringay (a thinly disguised Evelyn Waugh) that to be taken seriously would entail a departure from the upper classes.

Like the frustrated hero of Vile Bodies, Mitford's young hero has written a novel; his, meant as a tragedy, has been widely received as a comedy, much to his chagrin. Amabelle's comment applies not only to Paul's novel but, of course, to Mitford's. This sheltered world within the comfortable house has been marked for women writers and readers, and somehow at the same time lost its claim to be saying anything worth reading outside that world.

The elision of the unpleasant is not a denial of its existence; au contraire. Holly in Happy All the Time devotes her whole life to being a "domestic sensualist," a phrase that recurs in Colwin's work; toward the end of the novel, the skeptical Misty Berkowitz reaches an appreciative understanding of Holly's mission: "Even Holly worked: she worked to make life sweet … she fought to keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay and to keep a sweet, pretty corner to live in." Like Holly, or like Stella Gibbons's Flora Poste, Colwin engineers a world in which the forces of disorder are kept at bay and the writer (or lover, or domestic artist) is free to see what is then possible. (The elegance of Colwin's style, and the pleasure it provides to the reader, are of a piece with her manipulation of her subject matter.) The omission of class issues, while it may prevent Colwin's novels from being universes, allows a sharp focus on moral and personal issues. It also suggests that aesthetics and class-consciousness cannot easily coexist. But the self-consciousness of Colwin's manipulations keeps the reader from lapsing into a comfortable compliance with the text's omissions, and both suggests and calls into question the effort that it takes to keep "chaos" at bay.

How wide her audience could be is another question. It is worth pondering that Colwin herself comes from a background marginal to the one she most often describes; she went to Cheltenham High School, a public school in an ordinary suburb of Philadelphia, and her high school yearbook picture shows her in black turtleneck, well on her way to Bard. To a nice assimilated Jewish girl from the suburbs, the world of Polly Solo-Miller is hyperbole: the carrying of a tendency to its extreme.

In Goodbye Without Leaving, Colwin does begin a consideration of race, class, and religion (however unsuccessful). Throughout the novel, it is Geraldine's rejection of the moral compromise she sees in the real world that makes her path so difficult. She loves Johnny because he loves rock and roll, and she is impressed with his ability to come to terms with the world of grownups, but all the same she fears he has sold out; she distrusts him when he tells her, "You can act like a regular person and still boogie in your soul." She despises the liberal politics of his law-firm friends, and invents a game called "Who Likes Negroes Most?" And she is even conscious that her own experience of being a Shakette is a luxury; to the others, it was a way out of the projects, as Grace reminds her when they meet again. In the face of her family's bourgeois values, Geraldine continues to pursue only what feels "fine, fine, superfine" to her: rock and roll, the history of the blues, motherhood (which she eventually embraces wholeheartedly). She sees the project of the Race Music Foundation, to preserve black music for black people, as right and noble. But the problem of relations between Jews and blacks never appears here—a thunderous omission.

Likewise, Colwin finesses the core problem with assimilation: not the denial of Judaism, but the denial of Jewishness. The Jews at the Hansonia Society are Western, not Eastern European; no one wears a yarmulke. They are Polly Solo-Miller with Auschwitz tattoos, and it is clear that the kind of internalized anti-Semitism that reflects hook-nosed caricatures still operates in Colwin's text. The old Colwin rises from the page when Geraldine finally takes courage to visit the "Neighborhood Synagogue" (not, you notice, Temple Beth Sholom), and remarks, "It was a square building that looked something like a Quaker meetinghouse." Now even the shul doesn't look like a shul. She takes her Seder seriously, but her husband and son hardly do. If she has a shot at finding Judaism, she gets nowhere near her Jewishness, which doesn't arise—except implicitly, in the continuing lostness of this main character. The failure here is like the failure to deal with black realities and Jewish/black realities; it may be an inevitable result of Colwin's aesthetic practice, but it shows where the weakness of that aesthetic practice lies.

Overall, the book is more successful in finally naming the problem and locating it in a nostalgic rock & roller than in resolving it, and is most successful in its evocation of the joy of rock in memory. But, uneasy and fascinated as ever, I for one will continue reading and re-reading Colwin; as she says of Nellie Felix, it will be interesting to see what happens to her, because she has always been a pleasure to watch.