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Summary
Summary
"[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly.... a stirring novel"--San Francisco Chronicle
Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table--her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. It's London in the 1960s and everything is being challenged and changed.
But what is being tolerated? Comrade Johnny delivers political tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Johnny's mother funds all but finds she can embrace only one lost little girl--Sylvia, who leaves for a South African village dying of AIDS.
These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and who, on the morning after, woke to find they were the ones taxed with cleaning up and making good.
Author Notes
Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (later Iran) on October 22, 1919 and grew up in Rhodesia (the present-day Zimbabwe). During her two marriages, she submitted short fiction and poetry for publication. After moving to London in 1949, she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in 1950. She is best known for her 1954 Somerset Maugham Award-winning experimental novel The Golden Notebook. Her other works include This Was the Old Chief's Country, the Children of Violence series, the Canopus in Argos - Archives series, and Alfred and Emily. She has received numerous awards for her work including the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, the David Cohen British Literature Prize, and the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. She died on November 17, 2013 at the age of 94.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In lieu of writing volume three of her autobiography ("because of possible hurt to vulnerable people"), the grand dame of English letters delves into the 1960s and beyond, where she left off in her second volume of memoirs, Walking in the Shade. The result is a shimmering, solidly wrought, deeply felt portrait of a divorced "earth" mother and her passel of teenage live-ins. Frances Lennox and her two adolescent sons, Andrew and Colin, and their motley friends have taken over the bottom floors of a rambling house in Hampstead, London. The house is owned by Frances's well-heeled German-born ex-mother-in-law, Julia, who tolerates Frances's slovenly presence out of guilt for past neglect and a shared aversion for Julia's son, Johnny Lennox, deadbeat dad and flamboyant, unregenerate Communist. Frances's first love is the theater, but she must support "the kids," and so she works as a journalist for a left-wing newspaper. Over the roiling years that begin with news of President Kennedy's assassination, a mutable assortment of young habituEs gather around Frances's kitchen table, and Comrade Johnny makes cameo appearances, ever espousing Marxist propaganda to the rapt young dropouts. Johnny is a brilliantly galling character, who pushes both Julia and Frances to the brink of despair (and true affection for each other). Lessing clearly relishes the recalcitrant '60s, yet she follows her characters through the women's movement of the '70s and a lengthy final digression in '90s Africa. Lessing's sage, level gaze is everywhere brought to bear, though she occasionally falls into clucking, I-told-you-so hindsight, especially on the subject of the failed Communist dream. While the last section lacks the intimate presence of long-suffering Frances, the novel is weightily molded by Lessing's rich life experience and comes to a momentous conclusion. (Feb. 10) Forecast: A must for Lessing fans, this book carries echoes of much of her previous work, bo (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Lessing's phenomenal oeuvre could be the work of several writers: a commanding memoirist (unfortunately, she won't be writing the hoped-for third volume of her celebrated memoirs "because of possible hurt to vulnerable people"), a radically candid novelist, and a genre-bender in her literary science fiction. Now in her eighties, this pioneering and masterful writer of conscience unveils a realistic tour de force. The epicenter is a grand old house in London, the holdfast of the seemingly impervious widow Julia. It's the early 1960s and when her selfish and feckless communist son, Johnny, callously abandons his wife, Frances, and their two young sons, Julia persuades her resilient daughter-in-law to move in with her. Soon Frances, a self-possessed yet endlessly empathic and accommodating earth mother, is presiding over a contentious commune of moody teenage "waifs and strays," including Sylvia, the frail and brilliant daughter of Johnny's neurotic second wife, who becomes the hero of the novel's powerful closing sections. Frances lives the values mooch Johnny merely preaches as she feeds multitudes at her enormous kitchen table, and offers advice, financial support, and sanctuary. Lessing tells the interwoven tales of each magnetic member of this large and volatile extended family with passion and purpose, moving forward in time and out of London into AIDS-ravaged Africa as she critiques the sweet utopian dream of communism that went so nightmarishly wrong. The force of Lessing's vast knowledge and wisdom and the vigor and vision of her imagination and conviction are felt on every page as she considers the depthless compassion and courage of women, the hubris of "world savers," the catastrophic failings of politics and religion, the unending need for succor, and life's "infinite incongruity." Donna Seaman
Kirkus Review
The dream of a perfect society is the ironic center of Lessing's absorbing new novel: her 24th, published in her 82nd year. It's set mostly in the 1960s in Hampstead, a suburb of London, where protagonist Frances Lennox gets by as a columnist for the leftist newspaper The Defender, and de facto earth mother to a crowd of teenaged runaways and misfits as well as her own two fatherless sons. Frances's own "dream" (of a life in the theater) is thwarted by the unreliability of her ex-husband Jolyon (a.k.a. "Comrade Johnny"), a lifelong revolutionary activist and poseur whose stubborn devotion to socialism and Communism in all their permutations (including Stalinism) has left him no time or energy for family obligations. Lessing (Ben, in the World, 2000, etc.) energetically contrasts Johnny's political fantasies to the reality of his stepdaughter Sylvia, a selfless physician who pits herself against the catastrophe of AIDS by running a free hospital (during the 1980s) in the poverty-stricken African republic of Zimlia (which is, pretty clearly, Zimbabwe). The several stories that develop from such contrasts are rather inelegantly cobbled together, but Lessing is after bigger game than narrative unity: The Sweetest Dream is an anatomy of women's lives throughout the postwar period, and it comes unforgettably alive in notably detailed explorations of its characters' conflicting (and conflicted) struggles. To be sure, Johnny Lennox is a caricature (though one of Dickensian richness), as are the feminists whom Lessing can't resist vilifying (yellow journalist Rose Trimble, for example, and effulgently absurd Julie Hackett, who detects pro-male bias even in the scientific fact that only the female mosquito carries the malaria germ). Sylvia is arguably too saintly, but her ordeal is made quite moving. Lessing triumphs, though, with both the stoical, sentient figure of Frances and that of Johnny's mother Julia, a German-born widow whose own complicated relationships to the burdens her son thoughtlessly imposes on "his" women are simultaneously haughty, principled, and heroic. Lessing's best in years. She remains, in vigorous old age, one of the world's essential writers.
Library Journal Review
Lessing leaves sf behind. It is the early Sixties, and Frances Lennox happily serves big meals to her teenaged sons, their friends, and whoever else happens to wander in off the street. But her "sweetest dream" is about to go sour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Sweetest Dream A Novel Chapter One An early evening in autumn, and the street below was a scene of small yellow lights that suggested intimacy, and people already bundled up for winter. Behind her the room was filling with a chilly dark, but nothing could dismay her: she was floating, as high as a summer cloud, as happy as a child who had just learned to walk. The reason for this uncharacteristic lightness of heart was a telegram from her former husband, Johnny Lennox--Comrade Johnny--three days ago. Signed contract for Fidel Film all appears and current payment to you Sunday. Today was Sunday. The 'all arrears' had been due, she knew, to something like the fever of elation she was feeling now: there was no question of his paying 'all' which by now must amount to so much money she no longer bothered to keep an account. But he surely must be expecting a really big sum to sound so confident. Here a little breeze--apprehension?--did reach her. Confidence was his--no, she must not say stock-in-trade, even if she had often in her life felt that, but could she remember him ever being outfaced by circumstances, even discomfited? On a desk behind her two letters lay side by side, like a lesson in life's improbable but so frequent dramatic juxtapositions. One offered her a part in a play. Frances Lennox was a minor, steady, reliable actress, and had never been asked for anything more. This part was in a brilliant new play, a two-hander, and the male part would be taken by Tony Wilde who until now had seemed so far above her she would never have had the ambition to think of her name and his side by side on a poster. And he had asked for her to be offered the part. Two years ago they had been in the same play, she as usual in a serviceable smaller role. At the end of a short run--the play had not been a success--she had heard on the closing night as they tripped back and forth taking curtain calls, 'Well done, that was very good.' Smiles from Olympus, she had thought that, while knowing he had shown signs of being interested in her. But now she had been watching herself burst into all kinds of feverish dreams, not exactly taking herself by surprise, since she knew only too well how battened down she was, how well under control was her erotic self, but she could not prevent herself imagining her talent for fun (she supposed she still had it?) even for reckless enjoyment, being given room, while at the same time showing what she could do on the stage, if given a chance. But she would not be earning much money, in a small theatre, with a play that was a gamble. Without that telegram from Johnny she could not have afforded to say yes. The other letter offered her a niche as Agony Aunt (name still to be chosen) on The Defender, well paid, and safe. This would be a continuation of the other strand of her professional life as a freelance journalist, which is where she earned money. She had been writing on all kinds of subjects for years. At first she had tried her wings in local papers and broadsheets, any place that would pay her a little money. Then she found she was doing research for serious articles, and they were in the national newspapers. She had a name for solid balanced articles that often shone an unexpected and original light on a current scene. She would do it well. What else had her experience fitted her for, if not to cast a cool eye on the problems of others? But saying yes to that work would have no pleasure in it, no feeling she would be trying new wings. Rather, she would have to steady her shoulders with the inner stiffening of resolve that is like a suppressed yawn. How weary she was of all the problems, the bruised souls, the waifsand strays, how delightful it would be to say, 'Right, you can look after yourselves for a bit, I am going to be in the theatre every evening and most of the day too.' (Here was another little cold nudge: have you taken leave of your senses? Yes, and she was loving every minute.) The top of a tree still in its summer leaf, but a bit ragged now, was glistening: light from two storeys up, from the old woman's rooms, had snatched it from dark into lively movement, almost green: colour was implied. Julia was in, then. Readmitting her mother-in-law--her ex-mother-in-law--to her mind brought a familiar apprehension, because of the weight of disapproval sifting down through the house to reach her, but there was something else she had only recently become aware of Julia had had to go to hospital, could have died, and Frances had to acknowledge at last how much she relied on her. Suppose there was no Julia, what would she do, what would they all do? Meanwhile, everyone referred to her as the old woman, she too until recently. Not Andrew, though. And she had noticed that Colin had begun to call her Julia. The three rooms above hers, over where she stood now, below Julia's, were inhabited by Andrew the elder son, and Colin the younger, her and Johnny Lennox's sons. She had three rooms, bedroom and study and another, always needed for someone staying the night, and she had heard Rose Trimble say, 'What does she need three rooms for, she's just selfish.' No one said, Why does Julia need four rooms? The house was hers. This rackety over-full house, people coming and going, sleeping on floors, bringing friends whose names she often did not know, had at its top an alien zone, which was all order, where the... The Sweetest Dream A Novel . Copyright © by Doris Lessing. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
