Crucial is perhaps too emphatic a word for Miss Sarton's short
novel which lacks the urgency of the issue of her last one (As We
Are Now, 1973) and deals with a common enough situation when Poppy,
50, decides to leave her husband, Reed, after 27 years of marriage
in search of her "Personhood." This with only one token
acknowledgement of Women's Lib. It is rather Watergate which has
brought home to her the sullying business of compromise. Now Poppy,
her children grown, is still a "terribly unfinished, searching mass
of conflict..." and is determined to feel like an "authentic human
being" and become a sculptor. Even if Reed had spent $20,000 on a
studio for her, he had also given her constant migraines, colitis
and "despairs." The conversations circumnavigate this
"life-enhancing" decision and take place primarily between Poppy,
Reed and Philip or Pip, friend of the family who has apparently
held the marriage together longer than it should have been. That's
about it - a domestic sundry and no doubt Miss Sarton's readership,
an unquestionably steadfast one, will not reproach her for what
seems less than authentic ("dear heart," "his secret treasure,"
etc., etc.) today - almost protected from modern times. (Kirkus
Reviews)
"May Sarton's provocative novel is about a wife who has outgrown her husband, and after twenty-seven years of marriage decides that she has had enough. . . . she is altogether believable." —The Atlantic Reed and Poppy Whitelaw's conventional and apparently serene life together is shattered when Poppy tells Reed that she has decided to leave him. In a series of encounters that follow the shock of this news, which affects not only Reed but also their children and friends—in particular Philip, who must learn why he is so invested in their marriage—Reed and Poppy struggle to make sense of their lives in this alien new terrain.
"May Sarton again has entered Marquand-Updike territory and fortunately for us has brought to this fictional region the viewpoint of a first-rate craftsman who happends to be a woman vitally interested in both art and life." —Boston Herald
"Produces insight for the reader into the modern dilemna of reedom versus marriage, self-realization versus service and duty and finally the Sisyphean problems of the person alone, living on the threshold of other lives. . . . I find Crucial Conversations moving. . . . May Sarton has dealt with every aspect of female existence, with every kind of love. In this latest novel she has taken another, new step forward, and suggested a radical solution to the human-bondage-in-marriage status." —Doris Grumbach, New York Times Book Review
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