No one can accuse Marilyn French of having more than one string to her bow. If her first novel, "The Women's Room," was a didactic demonstration of why marriage won't work until the foundations of industrial society are altered, then her new book, "The Bleeding Heart," is exactly the same thing…. The trouble … is that her first novel succeeded despite its grave artistic shortcomings. Indeed, she managed to turn those shortcomings to her advantage, by saying, in so many words, that if the men in her story were stick figures, it was because men in reality are stick figures; if the story she was telling was dreary, it was because the reality of marriage was dreary; and if her narrator's voice was monomaniacal, it was because she had been driven nearly mad by the truth. All of which lent "The Women's Room" considerable documentary power, and, by a sort of reverse english, a certain esthetic strength as well.
But we know what Miss French is going to say in "The Bleeding Heart"—at least we do after 20 or 30 pages…. [We] know that the final message will be that marriage won't work until the foundations of industrial society are altered, because she has already told us that. (pp. 194-95)
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our French, Marilyn 1929–: Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt Access Pass.
