Books: Contemporary Ulysses

THE CENTER OF THE STAGE (290 pp.)—Gerald Sykes—Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Dr. David Holderness, M.D., was no Ulysses—he was just a more or less preoccupied research man returning to the U.S. after a long stay abroad, and wondering how to pick up the threads of his marriage. In a way, his son Pete reflected, the situation did resemble the old Greek story: “Enigmatic Mother, Absent Father, Disagreeable Suitors.”

Carlotta, the Enigmatic Mother, was a frisky and fashionable actress living a life of frantic emptiness. And the Disagreeable Suitors were a passel of New York busybodies, creatures on the make. From this situation Novelist Sykes, an urbane critic of the U.S. urban way of life, has spun a quiet and thoughtful novel.

Carlotta, says one of her friends, is possessed by “the Zeitgeist.” For her, everything runs by fad: in the ’30s she marched in Union Square, now she cultivates her ego. Still beautiful in middle age, her mind as sleek as her skin, shrewd in business, burning with vanity, oozing prefabricated charm, she personifies the glossiest in Manhattan nightclub and summer-resort society. One weekend, in the summer of 1950, while the radio hums with reports of war in Korea, Carlotta throws a party in East Hampton for a speculator in money and models, a fellow-traveling movie director, an interior decorator with Lesbian appetites, and the decorator’s religious husband and soul-sick daughter. Son Pete finds them all disagreeable, but can’t quite say why.

Suddenly, Dr. David Holderness makes his entry. At first Carlotta is charmed; her rediscovered husband appeals to her sense of the theatrical. But gradually he rouses the irritation he always did. Even in his silence, “he made her feel shabby.” seeming implicitly to criticize her way of life. Each of Carlotta’s guests uneasily senses David’s moral strength, and each turns to him for help; but he can give none of them the ready-made solutions for which they yearn. David is trying to live his own life and to root himself in “a country-bred wisdom” as protection against the “artificial stimulation” of the city. To Carlotta, the aging star of bedroom farces, this seems a threat to her very existence, and she soon resents him violently.

The Center of the Stage ends indecisively, without the harsh clash that the opposition of Carlotta and David calls for. But while the book is written in too muted a pitch, it is clearly a serious effort to describe, and prescribe for, the Carlottas of this world. Novelist Sykes has an enviable gift for writing cultivated dialogue and intelligent reflection; his book, even in its limp spots, reveals the controlling presence of a grown-up mind.