Do you turn the spade over the living heart?"") as well as the terrible (""Who can help me but God Himself Who has already failed and is not?"").
Miss MacIntosh, the central figure, a bald headed governess, solid as rock though smashed to pieces inside, stuffed with odd bits of useless knowledge, blighted remembrances she invokes the ordinary (""The life is what counts. Can one call it an ""extended metaphor""- the narrator representing Illusion haunted by Reality? Or is Miss Young's theme simply the irreality of life? The characters are large, luminous, bizarre, troubling. It is a hybrid work: a poetic novel which is also somewhat homey, overwhelmingly symbolic yet lyrical, incantatory but also humorous, rather grotesquely so. Miss Young's nominal method is stream of consciousness in her hands, however, it becomes a veritable sea, a floating palimpsest, polyphonic, impressionistic. Something of Virginia Woolf and Carson McCullers and Elinor Wylie is here, and something, too, of Jamesian psychology, Joycean puns, Proustian longueurs. Almost twenty years in the making, and one thousand and one hundred and ninety-eight pages long- twice the size of Dog Years, no less. You cannot argue away Miss MacIntosh, My Darling: it's just there, like Mount Everest.
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