Here is the sound of an author tipping her hand: "She turned, as always, to analysis, being a twentieth century woman and so subject to the superstition that what the mind could understand couldn't any longer hurt the heart, that what the tongue could utter was in the hand's control." It is the sound of an author urgently ordering and overruling her character, laboring to construct a sense of agon—contest, choice—when the evidence is already in and the outcome safely determined. This tone dominates Marilyn French's second novel, "The Bleeding Heart," and that is regrettable, because Miss French speaks to urgent issues between men and women, between what she sees as the unarmed individual and an oppressive society.

That she "speaks to them" at all, instead of embodying them is, however, the problem: Miss French has the soul of a polemicist nobly and earnestly gotten up in novelist's clothing. I truly wished the disguise had worked more than intermittently, but it is no surprise that anger and righteous disgust are vivid in their colors and will show through. "The Bleeding Heart" is not so vengeful as "The Women's Room," Miss French's first novel, but it is still undermined as fiction by its commitment to political rather than esthetic truth-seeking. As a reader I am never pleased to have to decide which of these commitments means more to me. In a more complex novel, they would not be separable….

"The Women's Room" declared the independence of one victimized wife after another; this novel is an admirably honest admission of the human complications that arise after a few years of lonely integrity…. (p. 9)

[In "The Bleeding Heart"] Dolores and Victor, humbled, learn to hear each other out, but it is hard to believe it is her incessant rhetoric that instructs either her lover or the reader. It is the human and terrible stories they tell, survivors' tales that show them stricken and needy despite their flamboyant defenses, and willing to confront their ghosts. These are affecting case histories, the most compelling sections of the novel, but they are so strewn with victims that they preclude any simple moral judgments. (p. 28)

The narrative straightforwardness of "The Bleeding Heart" could be seen as bluntness, as unfrivolous drive. I found it naïve and battering, weighed down by its didactic integrity—as if our newly won rights of full disclosure must be applied to novels, and to the minds of characters struggling toward honor, in a way that prohibits ellipsis, compression and the luxurious suavity of style. But subtlety and rhythmic prose are not the virtues Miss French's huge audience is going to come looking for. They want to know, in John Gardner's words, how to live the next part of their lives, and Dolores, in this stage just barely beyond anger, is as decent and explicit a model as they're likely to find in fiction these days. (p. 29)