Fusion After Fission

By John Skow

ANOTHER I, ANOTHER YOU by Richard Schickel

Harper & Row; 183 pages; $8.95

Divorce, the eighth sacrament, is so trendy these days that a full-grown citizen who has not known its astringent delights wonders more or less seriously whether he has denied himself one of life's meaningful experiences. Not splitting is like not going to Europe. A writer, in particular, finds divorce invaluable, as Richard Schickel proves in this literate and agreeably romantic first novel about a man and a woman who have shucked their first spouses.

Schickel, a writer-producer-director of TV documentaries, and cinema reviewer for TIME, is 45 and a veteran of one marriage and one divorce. Yet he writes with the freshness and emotional intensity of a 20-year-old memorializing his first love affair. His book is considerably more resonant than the customary first-love novel, however, perhaps because authors and characters in their 40s have deepened and mellowed, and those in their 20s are too raw to be consistently interesting.

The lovers here are David Koerner, a clever, successful, 42-year-old TV producer, and Elizabeth Adderley, a formidably bright and attractive woman whose occupation until recently was wife and keeper to a wealthy drunk. David and Elizabeth are old friends, but when they meet for the first time as free-floating singles, each is edgy and hesitant. Before long the reader sees an additional advantage to the subject of divorce and the curious second adolescence that follows a marital split. For American society in most of its aspects is too fluid and amorphous to sustain a comedy of manners (since all manners are equally acceptable). Divorce follows an intricate set of rules, some codified by lawyers and some worked out anew by each pair of partners in the unmating dance. Koerner's ex-wife sends their children to visit him in tattered sneakers and no raincoats, for instance, correctly assuming that his fatherly guilt will goad him to provide what is lacking. He counters by paying only half of the odd medical bills she has begun to generate.

The lovers move easily into a strong sexual friendship. But they are secretive because they have many mutual friends, and neither wants to endure the loss of privacy or the rituals of side taking that would follow full disclosure. Before propriety degenerates to absurdity, David and Elizabeth spend a glorious week together in a cottage in the English countryside. For that week they live happily ever after; then absurdity, in the persons of their respective exes, again obtrudes.

Early in the story, before Narrator Koerner has found his voice, there are a few sentences a bit too mannered and elliptical. "Some of them a sensible man would have paused with, perhaps found whatever it was he thought he was looking for," writes Schickel of Koerner's women friends. That second clause needs to be drained, refloated and fitted out with new prepositions. But the early lapses are not repeated, and the novel in sum is intelligent, sentimental writing for the middle-aged and cynical, who need it more than most.

-- John Skow

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