September 22, 1985

Alice, The Radical Homemaker

By DENIS DONOGHUE

THE GOOD TERRORIST By Doris Lessing.

oris Lessing has returned to Earth, after years of voyaging in space in her ''Canopus in Argos'' series of novels. But it is not clear whether she is here to stay or only passing through. The London her new novel describes is not a place I would even want to visit.

Mrs. Lessing's good terrorist, otherwise soothed as ''the poor baby'' on the last page of the book, is Alice Mellings, 36, a college graduate with a degree in politics and economics, daughter of upper-middle-class parents in Hampstead. She maintains a liaison blanche with Jasper, whose interests are resolutely homosexual. While he goes out cruising, the poor baby tries to turn an abandoned house into a home fit to be inhabited by a floating group of radicals. Alice and her companions call themselves the Communist Centre Union, and they plan to join the Irish Republican Army in some vague capacity as an ''England-based entity.'' But most of the novel is concerned with Alice's struggle to live in the house, at 43 Old Mill Road, and save it from demolition. In the process she discovers, not surprisingly, that a middle-class background is immensely helpful when you have to deal with bureaucrats.

''The Golden Notebook'' gained critical attention by questioning the assumptions of the realism Mrs. Lessing has variously preached, practiced and disavowed. Normally, we think of realism as art that keeps up the pretense of being life. But ''The Golden Notebook'' issued from Mrs. Lessing's intuition, provisional and belated indeed, that realism isn't in a privileged relation to nature; it is a convention like any other. Indeed, one of the problems with her new novel is that the scene it tries to evoke has already been lodged in our minds by television programs and newspaper photographs. The book rehearses images long congealed in our memories, and tries to make us imagine afresh what journalists and cameramen have so often delivered. Words are not, however, the most memorable form in which images of mess and riot are projected.

In her novels and stories, Mrs. Lessing is alert to the capacity of some people to live, for a moment, a decade or a lifetime, inside an idea; and live there with insistence enough to make the idea stand for the world. She knows, too, the cruelty practiced by people who live within an idea and deceive themselves into taking it for a conviction. In ''The Good Terrorist'' she gives Alice a small idea and forces her to live in it. The idea is simply to hate the middle classes - ''bloody filthy accumulating middle-class creeps'' - and to be a daily nuisance to them. When Alice can spare a few hours from the chores of homemaking, she joins her friends in a demonstration against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -''Queen Bitch Thatcher'' with her ''pink-and-white, assured, complacent Tory face.'' But Mrs. Lessing doesn't let Alice discover that the idea in which she lives is a blatant stereotype, and that her life is merely an imitation of the lives of others. In ''A Proper Marriage'' Mrs. Lessing's heroine, Martha Quest, discovers herself ''in the grip of the great bourgeois monster, the nightmare repetition.'' But Alice isn't given the grim satisfaction of knowing as much: she is allowed to regard her life as her own project of inventions and spontaneities.

It is not that Alice is really stupid, but - as John Crowe Ransom said of Scarlett O'Hara - the author ''enforces her upon us frequently in that light by reading her mind.'' Alice's mind, an unquestioned rigmarole of reactions and prejudices, makes it hard to care about her fate. About some of Mrs. Lessing's characters -Mary Turner in ''The Grass Is Singing,'' Susan Rawlings in ''To Room Nineteen,'' for instance - it is easy to care. But Alice exercises such a preference in favor of herself and her friends that any further tenderness on my part would be redundant. A selective camaraderie is the only value these characters hold, and that intermittently. They live on social security, and get whatever money they need by having Alice steal it from her father and mother. No visionary sense of life is fulfilled in these gestures.

''The Good Terrorist'' is bound to give comfort to the middle classes, if only because their enemies, Alice and her friends, are so ludicrously inept. Bourgeois liberalism is safe if these are the only opponents it has to face. I don't know why Mrs. Lessing has committed such a libel upon hippies. She has sent them back into the world with nothing in the way of imagination to keep them going or enhance their drift, and she has withheld from them the only imagination in their vicinity - her own. The withholding wouldn't matter if any of these characters had, as Henry James said of Fielding's Tom Jones, so much life that it almost amounts to his having a mind. But they have only the life of borrowed routine and inherited whim. At one point Jasper and his pal Bert go to Dublin and offer their services to two I.R.A. men in a pub. They evidently think that the I.R.A. has some interest in an international Communist revolution. In fact, the Provisional I.R.A. consists of hard-nosed Roman Catholics of the right, who would spot a Communist at 100 yards. But in any case Alice's friends are so incompetent that they can't even time a bomb.

The fame of Mrs. Lessing's novels has been a response not to their style but to their themes - Africa, black and white, women in love and dread, men in power, the fragmentation of one's life. The themes have been found not only germane but stirring. Yet Mrs. Lessing is not a stylist. Perhaps because she hasn't decided whether words can be trusted or not, she is sullen in their company. In ''The Golden Notebook'' Anna refers to ''the thinning of language against the density of our experience,'' a predicament equally bewildering to her creator. Sometimes Mrs. Lessing treats words as servants, and finds that servants so treated respond with ill will. Sometimes she writes as if to imply that reality best inscribes itself by remaining indifferent to the blandishments of eloquence. Mostly, her style is a prose without qualities, as if it refused to consort with the corrupt glory of Shakespeare's tongue. The words on the page are there to be seen through, not regarded. They seem to want to be rid of themselves even before their sentences come to the ordinary gratification of ending. IN ''The Good Terrorist'' the pervading style is insistently drab, presumably in keeping with the dreariness of the life it depicts: ''Cedric Mellings was the youngest of several children. The family came from near Newcastle. There were Scottish connections. Cedric's grandfather was a clergyman. His father was a journalist and far from rich. All the children had had to work hard to become educated, and launched. Cedric had been just too young for the war, and for this he had never forgiven Fate.''

It must be difficult to write such nondescript, dispirited sentences in English, a language notoriously sumptuous in echoes and reverberations. Mrs. Lessing's characters remind themselves that they are English when their overtures to Dublin and Moscow are spurned. Far into the novel, Alice has an argument with a revolutionary who introduces himself, implausibly, as Gordon O'Leary, ''third-generation American. An old Irish-American family. Like the Kennedys.'' ''We are English revolutionaries,'' Alice says, ''and we shall make our own policies and act according to the English tradition.'' But no English tradition sanctions the penury of her speech. O'Leary answers: ''It is of course understandable that you owe first loyalty to your own situation. But we are dealing with a struggle between the growing communist forces in the world, and capitalism in its death throes. That is an international situation, which means that policies must be formulated from an international point of view. This is a world struggle, comrade.'' B UT it doesn't matter that Alice is English and O'Leary ostensibly American, because they are types rather than individuals, exemplars of aging youth, inheritors of an experience that asserted its international character, 15 years ago, in clothes, language, attitude, music and gesture. References to Mrs. Thatcher don't conceal the fact that Alice's feelings are dismally posthumous. The young people in London today who hate Mrs. Thatcher express their hatred in other forms. The slogans are different, relations between workers and the unemployed are different, the divisions between classes are even more extreme than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Eggs are still thrown at Cabinet ministers, but the trajectory of the sentiments engaged is not the same. The differences are matters for a novelist's imagination.

The problem is not that in ''The Good Terrorist'' Mrs. Lessing has had an off day, but that she has taken a day off from her planetary assignments without enjoying it. She can hardly be supposed to have written the novel in defense of Mrs. Thatcher. But she hasn't worked her imagination or played it to the point of deciding whether Alice and her friends are the salt of the earth or its scum. Perhaps these decisions are easier to make on Canopus.

Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His most recent book is ''The Arts Without Mystery.''

TIME OUT FOR REALISM

Throughout her career, spanning three decades, Doris Lessing has been pigeonholed by readers and critics. ''I've been stereotyped differently at different times. I can't remember them all,'' she says. ''When my first books came out I was called a writer about race problems, then I was described as a political writer about Communism, then a women's writer, then a mystic writer.'' Her recent five-volume ''Canopus'' series, set on fantastic planets, may have left an indelible trace of otherworldliness on her public image, but when she is reached by phone in London it is the common-sensical Doris Lessing who appears, describing her latest work precisely. Although its subject is terrorism, ''it's not a book with a political statement. It's a novel about a certain kind of political person, a kind of self-styled revolutionary that can only be produced by affluent societies. There's a great deal of playacting that I don't think you'd find in extreme left revolutionaries in societies where they have an immediate challenge. You wouldn't have found this playacting in guerrillas fighting for a black government in Zimbabwe.'' Alice Mellings, the fictional ''good terrorist,'' is so contradictory that she produces a ''quietly comic'' effect, says her creator. ''Alice is a woman - though she's not adult -who is very caring and into sheltering people, but at the same time she's quite prepared to blow the whole city up. I think this is a pretty common contradiction in this type of person.'' Focusing on a common character type caused Mrs. Lessing to return to realism, and she cites some real-life sources for her novel. ''The immediate thing was the Harrods bombing [in December 1983] . Here the media reported it to sound as if it was the work of amateurs. I started to think, what kind of amateurs could they be? I got completely fascinated by this line of thought. Also, I happened to be in Ireland when they bumped off Mountbatten. I was just across the water from where it happened, and all the little boys, aged about 10 to 15, were rushing about, delighted, because of course they admire the I.R.A. I thought how easy it would be for a kid, not really knowing what he or she was doing, to drift into a terrorist group.'' Wh,tever the reception of ''The Good Terrorist,'' all her fiction exists under the shadow of ''The Golden Notebook,'' usually considered her masterpiece. But this stereotype, too, she resists. ''As I travel around I discover a lot of younger people have read the 'Canopus' series and are not interested in anything else I've written. They say, 'Oh, realism, I can't be bothered with that.' ''

-- Caryn James

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