cover image In the Country of Desire

In the Country of Desire

Leslie Garrett. HarperCollins Publishers, $22 (374pp) ISBN 978-0-06-016880-3

Desperately unhappy people leading sordid lives as they search unavailingly for love populate this tedious second novel by the author of The Beast , which won the Maxwell Perkins Prize in 1966. Despite such trendy topics as drugs and promiscuity, this is a curiously old-fashioned novel reminiscent of Dreiser's often plodding stories of lower-class people caught in lurid circumstances, with characters akin to Sherwood Anderson's grotesques--but without Anderson's brilliant touch. In 1960, Willa Rhineman, a 16-year-old New Jersey farm girl whose strong-willed grandmother has kept her isolated from and ignorant of the modern world, flees to Manhattan in search of the mother she has never known. Her precarious existence there is related in flashback counterpoint with the circumstances of her mother Madeleine's life, a desolate saga that includes incest, drugs, alcohol and a slavish adoration of one of the novel's most loathsome characters, an arrogant, sadistic poet. Actually, none of the novel's characters is remotely appealing; even Willa, a combination of innocence and native shrewdness, never captures the reader's interest. The melodramatic ending dissipates what little credibility the novel had achieved. (June)