[In the following excerpt, Flower offers a positive assessment of Searoad.]

Fiction, especially modern fiction, licenses a certain amount of prurience. It invites us into the mind of a character or a narrator, and lets us indulge ourselves there rather freely. We are pleasantly exempt from the risks of any real intimacy. Readers are supposed to be eavesdroppers and spies, of a certain kind at least. Filmgoers have to confront their own voyeurism at some point, morally, but readers of Lambert Strether or Lily Briscoe or Quentin Compson are not likely to have that problem. Just looking, thanks. In the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom watches Gertie MacDowell on the beach while we hear by means of internal monologue the cliché-ridden contents of her soul come forth. Bloom watches her pruriently, and has an orgasm. We invade Gertie’s privacy too, in a different way, remaining at what seems a safe aesthetic distance, since none of it actually happens—except by means of our looking at words printed on paper. We are supposed to be critically detached, having “participated” in the scene, if at all, only imaginatively and figuratively. No real Gertie MacDowell has been seen in actuality, hence no privacy violated. Still, I think Joyce may be offering a subtle lesson here about the potential for readerly prurience, a lesson usually ignored. Readers like to award him high marks for the relentless intimacy of his narrative, without asking what that intimacy might be for.

Obviously there’s an undercurrent of something unsavory, something collusive, in the way modern fiction makes a commodity of what’s usually kept private. So many novels cater so lavishly to our desire for intimate access to another. Really, of course, it’s only the illusion of such access. But no matter: it creates a dangerous kind of appetite. Those fat books on the best-seller lists pander to it shamelessly. So does Norman Mailer’s latest, fattest novel, purportedly an exposé of Eros and Faust at work in the CIA. Anything for the illusion of privacy and intimacy laid bare. There are a good many better novels around. Not that they eschew intimacy or censor the reader’s investigative curiosity: plot, suspense, narrative drive would be lost without that. But these books are better partly because they make us conscious of our power to invade privacy, conscious of the very prurience and voyeurism latent in fiction itself.

Consider the way Ursula Le Guin for example broaches the problem in her latest book, a sequence of stories centered in a small town on the Oregon coast. In “Sleepwalkers” she portrays the character of Ava, a motel chambermaid, from five different subjective points of view. Most of her observers know nothing about Ava. The only one who sees her past her ordinariness and “niceness” is an older woman—Mrs. McAn—who is curious to understand why Ava walks “like a woman on a high wire. One foot directly in front of the other, and never any sudden movements.” Mrs. McAn’s curiosity represents ours, a desire for empathy masking a more primitive desire to probe the interior truth, to know. But even when we find out that Ava was driven to kill her husband and now seeks guiltily to hide that justified act, Le Guin reminds us that this too is only a version of Ava’s story—a product of the older woman’s educated liberal white feminist point of view. The whole story emphasizes the often careless and indifferent power of others in fixing one’s identity. Even those who presume to know Ava’s “truth,” like Mrs. McAn and the reader, participate in the process.

The best stories in Searoad concern people like Ava and Mrs. McAn, the more isolated and marginal figures of the town, people who are just passing through, or managing a failing business, or hiding from something in the past, holing up emotionally. Most of them are in a sense looking for a good novel to read. The woman who runs the motel in “The Ship Ahoy” likes to keep one unit free so she can doze and daydream there occasionally. She is startled to hear through her thin wall the anguished sobbing of one of her guests—a young man in the throes of suicidal despair. Shocked, she runs outside, unaware that the sobbing expresses her own repressed anguish. Nothing more is explained; Le Guin resists any further invasion of privacy. “True Love” makes a similar point. It’s the wry account of a librarian who knows her books better than anything else, but tries out a summer romance with the new bookseller in town anyway. Her disappointment in him is balanced by a sudden burst of love for the Other Woman in the case—the happiness of having shared something with an otherwise unreachable person.

Le Guin is a scrupulous writer, with a fine sense of the dignity and vulnerability of people—frequently but not exclusively women—whose privacy may all too easily be invaded and abused. Her effort to shape the sequence of stories into something more, a “chronicle” of this coastal village à la Dunnet Landing or Winesburg Ohio, doesn’t quite come off. There are some maps of the place, a wispy-poetical prologue about feminine waves and clouds, and a longish three-generations-of-women narrative, “Hernes,” at the end. Trouble is, Le Guin doesn’t seem to know the Herne family intimately, the way she knows her marginal or itinerant people. So the three generations of Herne women tend to sound alike, to blur into one another, to get lost in a welter of information instead of dramatized acts. Still, Searoad contains a sequence of ten richly interrelated stories, conceived entirely without benefit of science fiction, and the result is impressive if not up to Sarah Orne Jewett’s level.