Office romance

Harriet Waugh

When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he replied, 'To love and to work'. Gwyneth Craven in her novel Love and Work ex- Mores this profundity and has wittily encap- sulated the two strands in an 'office romance'. What emerges is a picture of American society in a catatonic fit. The protagonists of this beached office romance are Joe, the editor of a business newsletter, and Angela, the assistant he takes on to give him more time to work out his relationship with Edith with whom he lives. Edith is very successful in abortion clinic management. Joe, who is divorced, has been living with her in a loft for nine Months and is very depressed. He has never found Edith particularly attractive and now she wants to marry him and have a child. Edith, who is earnest and implacable, puts Joe's reluctance to admit that it would be good for him to marry her down to an in-

capacity to face up to his responsibilities. She is convinced that if only he will do cou- ple therapy with her, their problems can be resolved. In the end her success lies in con- vincing herself and Joe with the aid of a psychologist, Midge, of the exact opposite of what they both feel. Here is a conversa- tion at a point in the novel when Edith decides to change her tactics with Joe:

". . . but what I want to know is, what's wrong with just having a super career? Midge thinks that what I really want is to take this clinic thing and run with it. There's always going to be a demand for abortions. Hospitals and clinics are always crying for decent administrators . . . So the bottom line is that I really didn't mean to be pressuring you about marriage after all." She takes a deep breath, beams at him like a gawky teenager practicing friendliness, and lights a Gauloise.' Excellent stuff!

One of the few facts that Joe does know is that he fell passionately in love with Angela when he interviewed her for the position of his assistant. That moment of ir- radiation confuses him for the rest of the novel while Angela, who also fell in love with him at first sight, is gradually smothered in that confusion. They spend the first 151 pages discussing whether they should make love and the next 170 pages or so debating whether having had sex they should continue to have it. Not that they do much. This scenario is fairly conventional but the interest of Gwyneth Craven's novel lies in the peculiarly American verbal hiatus that strangulates them and nearly every other character in the book. This is a telephone conversation in which Joe tells Angela that he has lost his nerve about coming round to her flat and consum- mating their passon: Angela, "I'll always know you, Joe, and I don't want to engineer a hostile situation.".. .

"Right," Joe says. "We should make some ground rules."

"Ground rules are good," Angela says.

Why is she so God damned agreeable? She said not long ago that she did not believe in rules. "Let's say there , will be nothing physical and see what happens."

"Fine," she says.

She's maddening, she's weak. "The ground rules will give us a structure," he's feeling better; this is like planning a news- letter. "We didn't have a structure before . . ."

"Yes, let's keep everything clear between us."

"I know we can learn to trust each other," he says.

"Right." It had never occurred to her before that they might not be able to trust each other.

"I see you as being intense," he says . .

This marvellous verbal guff entraps all the characters so that they can only interact with their own twitching psyches. They are all into therapy and take their dreams very seriously (the descriptions of dreams are one of the few weaknesses in the narrative. Very few writers can make dreams anything but skippable and Gwyneth Cravens is no exception). Women in desperation take to work as to the bottle, men in puzzlement fall back on home improvements, mechanical sex and fantasy. With the ex- ception of Angela, to whom the reader becomes mildly attached, all the characters are fairly ghastly.

Angela who is pretty, has vitality and is still capable of reaching outwards, finds all the energy she wishes to channel towards Joe diverted into the newsletter. As her romance splutters uncomfortably along her non career rockets. Joe is a sort of Amoeba; he clears his throat, chews his bandit moustache, is squidgily unhappy, flows where the water (Edith) takes him, and feels that life, circumstances, Angela have somehow let him down. The mystery is why Angela loves him and sustains her passion through all his `tns' and `ers', and his unexpected marriage to Edith. The answer possibly lies in the writer's depiction of American malehood. None of the men in the novel have much physical presence, all of them suffer visibly bleeding egos. Their feeling for Angela (she has a couple of in- cidental lovers) is merely torch-light reflected off their wounded psyches. Women, with the exception of Angela and a cancer mystic, fare no better than men. Though the fact that Angela is likeable tilts the satiric force of the novel mildly against men. Given that the writer is a women this seems a perfectly natural bias. To ap- preciate the humour of this novel properly I think it is necessary to be English.