Books: Woe Revisited

OLIVER’S STORY

by ERICH SEGAL

264 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Erich Segal should sue. Someone who looks like him, talks like him and thinks like him is running around the TV talk shows claiming that Oliver’s Story is better than Love Story. Not that Love Story was so good—in any way. It is simply that the sequel is so wretched—in every way.

Oliver’s Story begins in June 1969, 18 months after the death of Oliver’s wife Jenny. Oliver Barrett IV has turned his back on his proper Boston family and an impressive textile fortune, and sunk himself into the defense of civil liberties, a basement apartment in Manhattan—and gloom. He goes to parties and he sits. When friends introduce him to pretty girls, he glowers and storms away. Finally, jogging in Central Park, he sees Miss Right II, a beautiful blonde named Marcie Nash, who captures his fancy by running faster than he does. They have dinner at “21” and exchange this year’s most ungainly badinage:

” ‘Are you in the fashion business?’

I inquired.

” ‘Partially. And you?’

” ‘I’m into liberties,’ I answered.”

Marcie should keep on running. But being beautiful, rich beyond avarice and wholly artificial, she falls for him. For a hundred pages or so, Oliver is equally smitten. But when he finds that Marcie’s fortune is derived from sweated labor in Hong Kong, he calls it a day, moves back to Boston, takes over the family enterprises and finds that Oliver III, from whom he had rebelled in Love Story, has been, beneath that stuffed shirt, a closet liberal all along. But have no fear. The revelation is not enough to make Ollie IV happy, and as this fairy story for depressives ends in December 1976, he is as miserable as ever, working hard, jogging along the Charles and still mourning over Jenny. The lover of decent prose is equally miserable. Only Erich Segal is happy—$1.5 million richer for this minutia, soon to be made into a minor motion picture.

Gerald Clarke