cover image THE SILENT WOMAN

THE SILENT WOMAN

Susan M. Dodd, . . Morrow, $25 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-688-17000-4

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THE SILENT WOMANSusan Dodd. Morrow, $25 (336p) ISBN 0-688-17000-5

Dresden in 1918 is far from the rural settings of Dodd's Mamaw and The Mourners' Bench, and the prose style of her seventh work of fiction is a departure, too. Instead of American vernacular, she writes in the sophisticated flourishes of Dresden's intellectual community; instead of being poetically compressed, her language swirls with sensual impressions and erotic emotion. The eponymous Silent Woman is a lifesize doll replicating Alma Mahler Gropius, made for an obsessed Oskar Kokoschka, her spurned lover. Already in debilitated physical condition due to WWI battle wounds and shell shock, Kokoschka is also close to emotional collapse. Although he's been hired as a teacher at the Dresden academy and provided with room and board by the generous director of the art museum, he's unable to paint, sleep or eat. Hulda, the lonely young housekeeper, falls in love with the tortured artist and attempts to succor him. Coming ever closer to dementia, Kokoschka renames her Reserl, takes her to his bed and teaches her to be a lady's maid to his inanimate companion, never seeing her as a woman, only as another instrument to manipulate in his desire for Alma. Hulda suffers his demands in the same silence as the doll, praying, meanwhile, that he will acknowledge her as a person. Dodd's writing has always been graceful, but here she reveals a brilliant visual imagination, expressed in intensely vivid descriptive passages that reflect the personality of an artist striving to express his creativity. But Kokoschka's feverish thoughts and erratic behavior keep the narrative at an overwrought pitch, and his unremitting misery, anguish and despair verge on hysteria. As a portrait of an artist consumed by passion, the novel has authority, but it can be a wearying experience to read. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov. 1)