Every housewife is entitled to hobby to help her escape the humdrum patterns of existence that raising children and watching hubby's waistline grow can engender. And writing is as constructive a pastime as any.
And, as long as she's at it why not draw on one's womanly sensitivity, experience and powers of observation to write what the PR blurb describes as the story of two girls, "one self-assured, perhaps even aggressive, eager for companionship, and decidedly on the make," and the other young lady, the narrator, "shy, sensitive, and cautious, yet at the same time eager for a relationship she fears but finds constantly in her dreams," and later how "in the New York world of abundant drink and casual fornication, the relationship between the two girls becomes, in a sense, reversed." Fine idea in theory, but in this case it doesn't quite come off.
There are some positive features buried in Anne Bernays' The New York Ride, but before explicating them, one might as well fricassee some others that so richly deserve it.
Such as Miss Bernays' prose. One might liken reading it to riding a bicycle over railroad ties: the slower you go, the harder it is to slog on -- the faster you go, the more your brains are scrambled. Her first sentence is perhaps the most complicated grammatical collection of sundry phrases, clauses, and punctuation since Galliawas divisa into partestres. It deserves quoting as an example of a good way to stun a reader and wreck some moderately refreshing images. Says she:
The summer after my sophomore year in college I traveled in France and Italy with a friend, Elizabeth Storer -- a friend whose composition baffles ma yet, and who seems. In memory to resemble two friends -- not split down the middle or in half (as in a child's book where it is possible by flipping its pages, to assemble thirty-eight different Dutch-deer figures), but thoroughly mixed, like the batter for a cake or the eventual psychic resolution of a childhood half-happy, half-grotesque.
Not even from a post-adolescent female Holden Caufield could one swallow that.
The three-part book, narrated in the first person by Mary, relates the experiences, mostly amorous, of two girls (1) traveling in Italy for the summer; (2) living together in the Village for a couple of years; and (3) living (a) happily (b) unhappily in the matrimonial state.
The story line itself is some-where between bad New Yorker and good Modern Romances, and it isn't helped by Miss Bernays' failure to make most of the minor characters come alive. For example, the various dirty old and dirty young men the girls meet in Italy are somewhat far-fetched, to say the least. And somehow, one can't quite picture an alcoholic painter-lover, who "treated life as if it were a hard-boiled egg, cracking it open and devouring it regularly."
But the main failure of the novel is that the central characters are interesting neither as individual persons, nor as case studies of their generation. Not special enough for the former role nor representative enough for the latter, they're just dull. One really can't get himself to give a jolly hurrah about. Mary's search for happiness or Betsy's search for unhappiness, and after reading along for a while, it soon becomes plain how a bored psychiatrist feels.
There are some bright spots in the book. Betsy's letters to Mary have the genuine mock-jovial tragic confessional touch of an unhappy person indulging in the fascination of watching herself go to pot. These letters, more than the dozens of other pages spent on the subject, lay bare the workings of her involuted psyche.
Miss Bernays is at her best in capturing dialogue. One is truly embarrassed for poor Mr. Storer, Betsy's good Catholic father who hasn't been munion in 25 years, as up Mary, herself a It would take
