[Maxine Kumin's] powers of observation, interpretation, and phrasing are as strong as Updike's and less marred by moral perversity, excessive symbolism, and fine writing. But her novel [The Passions of Uxport] is as preoccupied as his [Couples] … with animal decay and the struggle to conquer the fear of death. And her narrative also suggests that sexual loss though not the whole of this fear, is central to it. Hallie's mysterious stomach pain, which sends her eventually to a psychoanalyst, is the novel's dominating fact. It is called "death," but we see that it has much to do with the fact that her husband will be away a great part of this year, that his adulteries have for the first time been discovered, that her children are growing beyond her care, that her niece's predicament arouses old resentments concerning her early marriage and hysterectomy, and above all that it disappears only when she asserts her sexuality by hurting her husband with a report of her own adultery. Mrs. Kumin is unnecessarily burdened by the idea that the analysis of Hallie's motives will cancel the moral value of her acts of rescuing and mending which her husband and doctor question. In any case we can accept Hallie's identification with Christ the prophet of social justice and the protector of outcasts. Mrs. Kumin is particularly impressive in conveying the moral bond between the insane Ernie, obsessed with his private rituals, and her more or less normal, very intelligent, and earnest heroine. Hardly less impressive is the fact that she can raise the question of individual moral commitment in connection with the Nazi holocaust without making one squirm.
The one major blemish is the ambitious portrait of Dr. Zemstvov, "the last of Freud's inner circle." Mrs. Kumin is conscientious enough to describe with some success Zemstvov's private feelings and the process of treatment. But there are crudely fitting pieces that make one uncomfortably aware of the author's own vanity and spite. Zemstvov at eighty comes out of retirement, reluctantly, to take on the fascinating Hallie, spouts jargon to the point of parody, intensifies the treatment against her wishes when he learns he is going to die, almost forces her to deny her belief that a certain dream means she wants to stop treatment (he admits he behaved badly here), dies the next day assuming "a foetal position," and is heavily mourned by Hallie with no mention of any relief at being rid of him. This won't do, and it looks worse in view of the illogicality of her two principal charges against psychoanalysis itself: first, that it wrongly tries to be a substitute religion, although it is clearly the Bible-haunted Hallie who is searching for that; and, second, that it imposes on its practitioners an Olympian detachment in contrast to Hallie's belief in "total commitment," a charge which is not only inconsistent with the first but which looks weak in itself, for the instances specified (Zemstvov advising her not to help Ernie further, another analyst advising Sukey not to have a baby) are instances of intervention, not detachment. But fortunately a sympathetic attitude toward psychoanalysis is not a requisite for insight, and The Passions of Uxport is often a wise and satisfying book. (pp. 120-21)
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