‘Yes & No’ a coming of age story Linda Tatelbaum’s newest is complicated but well written

YES & NO, by Linda Tatelbaum; About Time Press, Appleton, Maine, 2004; 240 pages, paperback, $14.95.

Linda Tatelbaum’s new novel, “Yes & No,” is the story of an American graduate student living in Paris during the winter of 1969-70. Naomi Weiss’ professors at Cornell University have packed her off to research the writings of the 12th-century philosopher Peter Abelard, and in the process she gets entangled in an intrigue involving medieval manuscripts, feminist radicals, and some sordid leftovers of World War II.

Naomi’s interest in Abelard centers on the 850-year-old love affair between him and his young student Heloise. The innocent Heloise was smitten by Abelard’s intellectual and physical attractions, and they fell in love and surrendered to their passion. In the ensuing scandal Heloise was hustled off to a convent and afterward “silenced,” as Naomi’s feminist acquaintances teach her to believe. Abelard, meanwhile, was castrated for his transgression.

Naomi wonders which is worse – to be castrated, or to live your life in a convent. Since the novel turns on the young American’s elaborate imagination of the parallels between herself and Heloise, much of the story takes place in Naomi’s head, a confusing location. Fearing to speak French with the natives and having virtually no one to talk to but herself most of the time, she dwells intently on her loneliness and isolation. Her situation is made worse by the fact that her stipend checks from America tend to turn up late, causing a chronic shortage of money, and therefore food. She consoles herself little-girl style by living on hot chocolate and pastries.

The young scholar also has trouble gaining access to the manuscripts she’s been sent to study. Professor Mauriet, an authority of French medieval studies, rebuffs her scornfully, and we learn that his reasons for dismissing her may transcend the fact that she’s a timid American, and extend to the fact that she’s Jewish. Soon Naomi suspects she’s obtained one of Heloise’s lost writings, and uncovering its authenticity – and eventually,

its whereabouts – draws her into contact with other people. The most interesting of these are a wild-eyed male librarian and a successful female scholar, whose characters remain largely unexplored because Naomi is so distant. In the meantime, two radical feminist Frenchwomen take Naomi under their wing and instruct her somewhat woodenly in feminist psychosocial dogma. The plot unfolds in Naomi’s search for the truth about the manuscript, and herself.

Readers with interests in female “coming of age” stories and in academia’s politics will love “Yes & No.” Naomi’s conflicts over domineering male professors, her fear that her own erotic desires will place her at the (further) mercy of men, and the story’s romantic backdrop of turbulent late-’60s Paris, provide pleasurable opportunities for reflection, and fuel for fires. The dialogue is sprinkled with foreign phrases that make you feel good about the remnants of your college French, and a good many fashionable academic beliefs about the nature of relationships between men and women are validated.

For some other readers, not all of Naomi’s epiphanic moments will be quite believable. A peculiarity of this novel is that even though one of its main themes involves the erotic, only one or two scenes grant fleeting moments of actual eroticism. In a way “Yes & No” is a book that shows how confused you can get by thinking too hard about sex. Toward the end, it’s admitted that Naomi is “still a virgin,” one of the more precise statements about her emotional makeup, but an indication of how little she actually changes during the course of the story.

The characters in “Yes & No” live on the surface of their beings – in physical, emotional and rational places that seem isolated from the deeper ranges of consciousness that preoccupied medieval philosophers such as Abelard. In a dream of meeting Heloise, Naomi seems to penetrate the membrane of her becluttered rationalizations and circumvented erotic desires. But the dream itself withdraws into dry dialogue full of didactic hints from the nun about living life, and ends up even less potent than Naomi’s waking rationalizations.

Although not for everyone, “Yes & No” is a complicated and generally well-written novel, and given the literary fashionability of its subject matter and message, it should have been picked up by a commercial publisher before it was self-published. It’s highly recommended for audiences who believe themselves to be mature.

“Yes & No” is Linda Tatelbaum’s third book under the About Time imprint. She lives in Appleton.

Dana Wilde is a copy editor at the Bangor Daily News. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.