She understands that the idea of 'personal relations' has been shaped by the catastrophes of our time and, in the form we know it, is not to be taken as an absolute or uncontaminated value. She yields her sympathies to those of her characters who fall back upon 'personal relations' in order to get through their days, but she tries not to settle for the limitations of experience they must accept. Both Miss Lessing and her characters are deeply caught up with the cult of 'personal relations,' yet she is able to keep some critical distance from her material and to look upon it as merely the latest turn in the confusion of modern history.

It is a particular distinction of The Golden Notebook, a long and ambitious novel by the gifted English writer Doris Lessing, that while dealing with some of the materials favored by novelists of sensibility, it escapes their constrictions of tone and outlook. But in both parts of the world, psychological man begins to replace social man. Among ourselves the devotion to 'personal relations' seems at times like a malaise eating away at personal life in the Communist countries it can serve as a rallying call for marginal freedoms.

'Personal relations' as the very substance and sufficient end of our existence 'personal relations' as a surrogate for transcendence through religion, fulfillment through work, satisfaction through community 'personal relations' as a fragile shelter for sensitive men, a bulwark against the nihilist void, an ideology of privacy to replace the lapsed ideologies of public action-all this has become a style of life in New York and Moscow, London and Warsaw, accepted by some intellectuals with a tiresome literalness and by others with a skeptical grin. The condition I have in mind-perhaps new for us, though hardly unprecedented-can be observed in the cosmopolitan centers of the West and increasingly in the more advanced totalitarian countries indeed, everywhere but in certain underdeveloped nations which are forcing their way into history and therefore are still in the grip of a national mystique or total ideology. In recent years the life of cultivated people has been marked by a fierce attachment to 'personal values.' I put the phrase in quote marks to point toward something more problematic than the usual web of involvements that appear when human beings live together in society.

The golden notebook review