THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606210725
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DIANA LYNN DIEHL
LENGTH: 62 lines
THE PULL OF THE MOON
ELIZABETH BERG
Random House. 193 pp. $21.
The moon's pull isn't the only thing driving Nan across the country. The narrator of Elizabeth Berg's fourth novel finds that turning 50 has a momentum all its own. She buys a leather-bound journal and runs away - leaving only a vague note for her husband, Martin.
Alternating between letters and diary entries, Berg convincingly shows the anxiety, fear and questioning of choices that women make when neither young anymore nor old yet. Like in her novel Talk Before Sleep, Berg explores women's relationships with other women as necessary to life, as necessary as food or sleep.
Nan remembers at age 11 lying on the floor under her grandmother's kitchen table, listening to the womanly conversations of her mother and her four aunts. While Nan was ``waiting so hard to grow up,'' her paternal grandmother advised her: ``Don't get old.''
Nan was forever changed by the arrival of her menstrual period. At the time, she remembers glimpsing her mother's freckled breasts beneath her housedress, looking ``old and superfluous.'' She felt sorry for the older woman, so far from Nan's new start. As a child she thought she could be anything she wanted. Life was full of possibilities.
But womanhood changed her. She began to doubt herself. Then, with menopause, the preoccupation with her body returned. She now feels like a teenager again, but without the cuteness or promise. Aging brings profound sadness and fear.
About a week before she leaves home, while lying in bed, Nan begins weeping so loudly that Martin awakens to ask what's wrong. She expresses a need for meaning and excitement to which Martin responds that life is ``by and large meaningless and dull.''
Nan later realizes: ``How I felt was not up to him.''
On her trip Nan has time alone to find strength. Sleeping in motels, cabins, and bed-and-breakfasts, she stops only when hungry, tired or when she sees something or someone worth exploring.
Along the way, she seeks out strangers who share things they may never tell anyone else. They feel safer opening up to someone who doesn't know them.
This way, Nan learns that the ``working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, full of color and life.'' She writes in her journal, ``It feels like this is my time for coming into my own.''
Gradually Nan realizes her depression is ``the cleansing act that makes room for what follows.'' In order to conquer her fears, she accesses her ``woman warrior'' by sleeping outside alone.
To calm herself she says the rosary, but to no effect. She then tries to remember every lover she's ever had, which merely keeps her mind occupied. Naked, lying down in the earth, she experiences a ``feeling of finding one's real place.'' A relief never before known comes when she realizes she is ``only fifty,'' and makes plans for her future.
Berg's fast-moving story invites us to share in Nan's fears and to experience the joy in her discovery that ``a certain richness happens only later in life.'' MEMO: Diana Diehl is a staff news researcher. by CNB