fiction that she has at hand would produce the kind of "competent and informative novels" that "pour from the publishing houses" (58). But this is not what she wants to do. The work she envisions (or finds herself incapable of envisioning) transcends the type of novel with which the readers, and Anna, are familiar. Anna's problem, however, is that she believes that she cannot produce the kind of fiction she wants to write because she is "too diffused" (58). But, as the reader discovers, it is the diffused character of Anna's life that proves to be the source of just such a work.
Lessing's novel is conceived on a vast scale and the complexities of its structure and the interrelationship of its parts defy complete analysis. Literary critics have tended, therefore, to concentrate on particular aspects of the book. Among those who have addressed the problems of creating this new type of fiction Draine, Greene and Abel have all begun by noting that Lessing's book is the work of a writer seriously opposed to the virtues of modernism. The traditional novel, with its reliance on the strengths of a particular type of narrative tradition and form, has no appeal for Anna. Her separation from this tradition becomes apparent as she discusses the genesis of her first, commercially successful, novel. The balanced columns of "source" material and "money" that begin the Black Notebook point up her discomfort with the rendering of her experience in a form that seems to her to be inauthentic (54). It strikes Anna that there was nothing in The Frontiers of War that was untruthful. Yet the partial, incomplete nature of the book--when it is contrasted with her intensely remembered time in Africa--leaves her dissatisfied.
But Anna has been frustrated in her search and when her analyst, the strange Mrs. Marks (or Mother Sugar) questions her "rationalisations" for avoiding writing Anna produces a defining statement about the problem. The pro...