Reviews
Maureen Duffy, a writer who has been gaining increasing recognition, publishes her third novel this week. Her first novel was about a child's relationship with its mother, her second, a marriage narrated from the male point of view. Her new book, The Microcosm , is described unsensationally on the jacket as a novel whose "main characters are all women (and which) deals with their relationships as they grow and as they disintegrate." The women, Matt, Steve, Marie, Cathy and Sadie, are homosexual. The story is narrated from the point of view of each in turn, and, in the opening section, it is clear that considerable attention is demanded from the reader. Matt, for instance, narrates events not only from her own point of view, but as she feels someone else another girl, a classical writer, even a 19th- century missionary-type anthropologist-would see them. Stylistic changes abound, and the narrator is variously "he" or "she" according to the point of view. Miss Duffy explains: "She thinks of herself as 'he,' but other people usually call him 'she.' The dia ogue is authentic, and so are the case histories. The author spent nearly two years note- taking, tape-recording, pinning people in corners and asking them about their lives. The Microcosm could be hailed as England's answer to Violette Leduc, or even to Mary McCarthy's The Group. She has worked "to get all the voices, the individual modes of expression, and to make the links, but not to make them too obvious." She says: "I don't know whether there will be an outcry or complete silence. I hope there will be an outcry. I am tired of the 'ordinary novel' the competent tale which isn't anything else. I'd rather make mistakes but feel I was trying to expand and feel." The Tatler, 14th May 1966
Although you would not gather it from the guarded blurb The Microcosm is a tough minded book about lesbians. It is less a novel than a series of personal histories and social studies mostly written in the toboganning first person singular. Maureen Duffy, too, is a writer who likes the reader to do his share of the work. One of her girls, cracking up under marital stress, launches into a 30 page monologue in lower case Molly Bloomese, and another episode follows the adventure of a transvestite actress in pastiche eighteenth century narrative (very accomplished, but why do it?)
Elsewhere we get lively scenes of a lesbian club, the reveries of games mistress (That’’ll be the day when I walk down the stairs of the club and come face to face with one of the old girls) and a spirited conclusion urging the butch and femme community to venture out of their world: “there are dozens of ways of being queer and you have to find out what your kind is and then make something of it.”
Miss Duffy seems to know the territory and she writes with energy and intelligence: her miscalculation is to suppose that occasional passages of literary contrivance will turn a well-argued polemic into apiece of fiction. Irving Wardle, The Guardian, 15th May 1966