Review of Herbert Gold's Girl of Forty Novel
Originally published in the Ohioana Quarterly Summer 1987
Herbert Gold bibliography and more reviews
A Girl of Forty by Herbert Gold. Donald I. Fine, 1986. 254pp $16.96.
Author. A native of Cleveland, Herbert Gold has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford. He now lives in California.
He has written many other novels as well as a variety of short stories and essays.
Herbert Gold's newest novel is a chilling indictment of the empty affluence and narcissism among San Francisco's BMW and tofu set.
No one comes out a winner in this one. Suki, the girl of 40, defies her years with a gleaming helmet of blond hair, a wiry body tuned by
modern health fads, and a cute little repertoire of moues and moves that never quits. Frank Curtis, untenured journalism professor,
takes on a spinelessly liberal role as onetime lover now friend and observer of the heavy sexual traffic that passes through Suki's breezy life.
His status as reliable old Frank puts him in occasional contact with her beautiful son Peter, who also plays a steady secondary role in Suki's life,
tinkering on his motorbikes, facing adolescence with sophistication and a roomful of VCRs, and getting up to have breakfast with one or
another of his mother's lovers morning after morning.
Everybody in fact comes second to Suki, until Peter's despair and rage erupt with the lethal effect of a volcano.
First in isolated incidents of nastiness and defiance, then in an act of pathological cunning, Peter howls from out of his overindulged emptiness.
The adults can't even begin to grope their way through his tangled emotions to save him or themselves from his despair.
Peter's tragedy unfolds in a tinkly cocktail party world of sleek, attenuated women and overachieving men who exchange
partners and banalities with equal facility. "I was eating sashimi when people thought it was only raw fish," brags Sherrie, graduate of the Burbank
Institute of Psycho-Dynamics. Understatement not being one of Gold's literary devices, Gold lays it on as thick as paté on a Brenner wafer.
But just when the reader looks around for a polite way to exit this party for good, the novel engages in another gear with Peter
at the wheel, an inexperienced and scary driver.
It's not a book to pull back from easily. A Girl of Forty rings all the dirge bells of contemporary urban/suburban life.
Everyone knows a Suki, a Peter, a Frank. They're the modern clichés of the fall of our "American way of life," and we face them as such with fascinated horror.
Trouble is, even with doom impending all over the place, Gold has so effectively depicted the moral void of his novel's world
that the characters are sucked in by the vacuum of their own emptiness. Suki, Frank, Peter, who really cares about them?
With Suki, maybe, minimal caring is appropriate. After all she sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, and the extent of her mother love and
grief will forever remain in doubt. But Peter ought to be charming and lovable - he's smart enough to be - so that his fall is a real perceivable loss.
But he lacks the natural charm of youth that should make him a figure more of tragedy than pathos. We're sorry he's had such a rotten upbringing, and
we recognize his potential as a recruit of the Symbionese Liberation Army and all the other bad ends of modern spoiled youth, but he's too remote,
too far gone perhaps, to twang the heartstrings.
As for Frank, he's as sympathetic as a favorite old sweater, but about as useful. He's more perceptive than the people he associates with, but
he's a parasite on the Suki world. When Suki sinks from bewildered grief, Frank's waiting below to catch her. He's the Dobbin of Vanity Fair and the
Charlie of Strange Interlude. Poor Frank, he's probably just caught a peck of trouble on top of the trouble he's been through, and he knows it.
Wisdom is represented by the big black cop, Alfonso, another former Suki lover, who irritates
Frank and the reader by his persistence in using opaque ghetto dialect even though he has a law degree. He sees all, knows all. The streets hold no
mysteries for him. Like the other principals in this novel, though, Alfonso can't stop the inevitable playing out of agony.
Neither formal education nor earthy wisdom can pull the damned from the vortex. Can love? Gold begins to suggest at the end that love may provide
enlightenment and salvation, but the suggestion is tentative, as well it might be, considering the limited emotional capacity of his characters.
Reviewer: At the time of this review Emily Foster was a staff writer for Columbus Monthly and a veteran contributor to Ohioana Quarterly.
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