Word: victors
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Three West Coast squads, the University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles, and last year's victor, University of California at Berkeley, all are the potential champions, but nearly everyone's pre-meet favorite is Florida...
Even Dolores' name is a constant and heavyhanded reminder: the Latin dolor, for pain; durare, to endure. Victor means victor, the confident, satiated gladiator who pats his woman on the rump and rushes off to compete for glory and riches. He gets ample time to give his side of the story. The man is bright but no intellectual threat to Dr. Durer's fevered assertions and generalizations. Still, he may be too smart to challenge such filibusters as, "What I want, Victor, is to change the world ... To make it a place where women...
...admire her for this, even while she uses her vulnerability to assume the dual role of a martyred carrier of great truths and a political radical who believes "you have to be narrow when you're at war." Neither is it difficult to understand Dolores' need for Victor's warm body at the same time that she resents him. She has had it rough, as her copious flashbacks to a miserable marriage and family tragedies indicate. Life is messy, after all, and consistency is often the first casualty...
...messy novel about life's disorder does not work any better than a tedious novel about tedium. The Bleeding Heart can be entered in both categories. Its beginning reads as if D.H. Lawrence and Erica Jong had collaborated on a soap opera. Victor and Dolores first meet on a train between London and Oxford, silently swap glances and end up in bed at her apartment without exchanging ten words or knowing each other's last names. A sample description of this zipless encounter: "They clutched and caressed as their hearts pumped, as the sparks fell, as fiery charges...
Paradoxically, much of the dialogue works. French has a knack for orchestrating voices. Even they grow stale, how ever, as the conversations between Victor and Dolores come to follow a predictable cycle: Scotch drinking, lovemaking, remembrances of painful pasts and talk that adds up to a feminist equivalent of Soviet socialist realism. Yet The Bleeding Heart is not just a popular novel for the female market. Attentive male readers will discover why so many wom en are now saying "Yes, yes" when there's "No, no" in their eyes...