Catching Saradove by Bertha Harris

Catching Saradove

Bertha Harris

A tangled, frenetic but courageous first novel which has to do with a young woman’s search for the self that proceeds from sexual identity. ”How to stay free and running fast” for Saradove dropout from a Southern home, was not to be caught in the bind of her mother, Olympia. Olympia, the lovely priestess of refined child-torture and social-climbing attainments, was as weak as water, but not as weak as Duncan, her alcoholic husband, who left his wife happily a widow before Saradove moved to Manhattan. Abandoning innumerable fantasied Saradoves, the daughter of Olympia imagines herself, in a new stance, as Olympia’s rescuer, who would be sure some day to win her mother’s love. In the meantime there was a ”world of women” to love. But after one troubled Lesbian affair, Saradove capitulates to reality in the form of the male, Johnson, and becomes pregnant. When Saradove finally knows, however, that Olympia does not need her love, will ”ask nothing,” she removes the last threat of reality through a giant scenic fantasy, rendering her child fatherless, pursues love ( and being) through an entirely female continuum. Miss Harris writes in a hot, peppery torrent-of-consciousness prose, noisy with shouting in the streets and buckshot flashbacks. Overwrought but undeniably talented. However, one wonders if catching Saradove is worth the exhausting chase.

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