The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration

The opening section, ``Some Biographical Notes on the Author (by the Author),'' gives the first taste of the self-conscious tone employed in this overwritten and unrevealing autobiography. Now in her late 70s, the author of The Changelings and other novels offers up a journal focusing on the later part of her life, particularly her self-doubt after the death of her mentor, Helen Buchman, a middle-class housewife and mother who took her in and encouraged her writing. The relationship between the two remains cloudy: the journal contains more information about Buchman's garden than about the women's emotional connection. Sinclair often touches on interesting issues but only in passing. She mentions that Buchman taught her the manners and niceties she hadn't known as a ``peasant'' in Cleveland's Jewish ghetto, then fails to illustrate that process. Only in the final pages of the book does she discuss her alcoholism and make a glancing reference to ``that suicide thing I went through.'' Sentence fragments punctuated by exclamatory comments do little to convey a sense of the literary life besides the cycle of work, rejection and acceptance that writing for publication entails. (Sept.)