The Fifth Child. - book reviews

National Review, June 10, 1988 by Jeffrey Giles

The Fifth Child

HARRIET AND David Lovatt won't stop having children. Throughout the "greedy and selfish Sixties," Harriet had been an anomaly: a Fifties throwback, an uptight wallflower, and, frankly, a husband-hound. David was an architect, a "judicious" drinker, and a "non-dancer." At the opening of Doris Lessing's latest novel, The Fifth Child, Harriet and David meet at a party and it's family-planning at first sight. They get married and set out to do the only thing either one seems capable of: tirelessly and ruthlessly churn out babies.

It has always been difficult to know what Doris Lessing will do next. She is an impatient, itinerant writer whose quest for perspective has taken her all over the map, both stylistically and politically. Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Fifth Child, then, is that it is quite unsurprising. Harriet is a familiar heroine for Miss Lessing. Like Alice Mellings from her earlier novel, The Good Terrorist, Harriet is the kind of heroine Miss Lessing uses to make a point. She is moody, stressed out, misunderstood by everyone, and inexplicably dull. David, unfortunately, doesn't fare as well. He is petty and selfish, and it's a safe bet that if Miss Lessing had given him a soul to sell, it would have gone to the devil long ago. For at least half of this slim, 133-page novel, the Lovatts seem little more than the butt of a joke about the nasty things that happen to people "brainwashed into believing family life is best."

Harriet and David have four children in the first six years of their marriage-each with "wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks." While their in-laws are footing the bills and doing most of the housework, they spend their time collecting firewood and making jam. In these opening sections, Miss Lessing treats her characters with such disrespect that the reader can't help but cringe at the wicked fate she is surely arranging for them.

The Lovatts' fate is not long in coming. Harriet and David accidentally conceive a fifth child and Harriet's pregnancy is so extraordinarily painful that even Miss Lessing begins to feel sorry for her. The book finally divests itself of its smugness and the prose takes on a new energy: "People in passing cars would turn, amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, white-faced, hair flying, open-mouthed, panting, arms clenched across her front. . . . Sometimes [Harriet] believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws."

But just as Miss Lessing hits her stride, Ben is born and the novel goes utterly awry. Ben is such a preter-naturally ugly and violent baby that Harriet is moved to remark, "He's like a troll, or a goblin, or something." Soon he's drinking ten bottles of milk a day and pulling toys apart with his bare hands. Try as they might, the doctors can't find anything wrong with him. And, for a while at least, the Lovatts put up with "Neanderthal baby," even as he emits "thick, raucous cries" and gives everybody "the creeps."

Predictably, the Lovatts turn out to be no match for Ben. How could they be? At one, Ben strangles both the cat and the dog. At six, he is hanging out on the street and "rush[ing] about on motorbikes or in borrowed cars." For someone with the right sense of humor, reading The Fifth Child can be an unbearably funny enterprise. Black comedy, of course, is not what Miss Lessing has in mind. She means to demonstrate the frailty-indeed the irrelevance-of traditional family roles in a world of "killing and hijackings; murders and thefts and kidnappings." Ben is the Lovatts' punishment "for thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be."

As the novel progresses, Harriet is overwhelmed with guilt at having given birth to such a shocking child. The "normal" society she lives in is more than willing to let her accept the responsibility. David is the worst of all. When Harriet refers to Ben as "our child," he responds, "Well, he certainly isn't mine." Eventually, David convinces Harriet to have Ben sent away to an institution where an indifferent staff will attempt to drug him into submission, then death.

Lessing has always written about women with candor and fierce loyalty. Her novel The Golden Notebook, for example, is a stunning, encyclopedic re-evaluation of gender roles. In The Fifth Child, Lessing again writes with considerable force as Harriet rejects the role she has been given as a woman and a mother. In the end, however, Lessing reinforces the very sexual stereotypes she appears to be battling. Harriet goes to reclaim her son, and the message seems to be that she alone is responsible for Ben's abnormality, and that women really are -above all else-mothers and wives. The novel complains about sexual stereotypes and conventional household politics, but it never manages to elude them.

Miss Lessing attempted to sketch out an alternative vision of the family in The Good Terrorist and was blunt about the difficulties such a project entails. In that book, Alice Mellings establishes a commune, hoping to come home at night "lit with the exaltation that comes from a day's satisfactory picketing and demonstrating and marching." With her young friends, she embraces every social issue she can think of: the plight of Ireland, the dumping of radioactive waste, "the ill-treatment of calves and chickens." Ultimately, however, concepts like family and property are just too strongly engrained: Alice's politics become fuzzy, and her commune becomes more and more like the Lovatts' house.