In 1980 Sartre Died

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

A father and son are obsessed with the same woman in this
psychoanalytical novel about relationships between men and women and
between family members. Differing perspectives on the situation are
presented through the characters’ thoughts.

Unfortunately, these varying viewpoints are expressed in 400 pages of
seemingly endless, virtually paragraphless prose. Indentation would at
least have given the reader a visual break from the tedium. What little
conversation leavens the monotony is very stilted. The speakers use each
other as sounding boards; in a supposedly two-way conversation, one
character always seems to be cueing the other; which makes for very
little natural conversational flow.

Similarly, though the characters are described both physically and
psychologically at great length, they remain curiously flat and
unnatural. Everybody, without exception, is beautiful, brilliant,
gorgeous, perfect, and splendid—no one is merely average. Their
tortuous self-examinations and psychoanalytical reflections on others
pall very quickly. Similarly, the descriptions of sexual encounters are
excessive and repetitive. The characters fall into bed with each other
with great regularity, and though we’re told far more about their
motivations for this than we want to know, the motif suffers from
overkill.

The death of a central character in 1980 provides one of the members of
the eternal triangle with the excuse to subject the reader to a 20-page
personal analysis (without a single paragraph change) of Sartre,
Flaubert, and Hardy—hence, presumably, the book’s title. The novel
is sprinkled with literary references, political philosophy, and asides
on feminism and poetry written by the characters, which are sometimes
extraneous, always verbose, and rarely conducive to relieving the
monotony.