By:Christian Kirkpatrick
Molly Benson is a middle-aged woman with more money than sense, and more heart than either, who bangs around her hometown of Princeton, looking for chances to right wrongs in the Third Word.
She is the heroine of "Loving Graham Greene" (Random House, $22.95), Gloria Emerson’s first novel, which was called in a recent New York Times book review "a funny, moving and strangely profound novel" and "a meditation on the powerlessness of those who simply want to do good in the world."
A former foreign correspondent for the Times and the author of three works of nonfiction, one of which – "Winners and Losers" – won the National Book Award in 1978, Ms. Emerson lived in Princeton for 15 years and taught journalism at Princeton University for three semesters. She calls the university the most beautiful in America and, though she now lives in New York, claims to still order picture frames from The Silver Shop in Palmer Square.
Ms. Emerson will be returning to Princeton on Sunday, Nov. 5, at 3 p.m. to discuss her novel at Micawber Books, 110 Nassau St. She confesses some apprehension at seeing her old haunts after an absence of several years.
Have things changed? Yes and no, as a short list of local references drawn from her book indicates: The Princeton Packet, Lahiere’s and the FitzRandolph Gateway are still here; Davidson’s and Woolworths are gone; the Trinity Church rummage sale is alive and well.
Certainly the milieu that the town is known for has not changed. Ms. Emerson calls it "a rarefied atmosphere inhabited by families of some wealth." Molly sees it as a world obsessed with owning the right things because they prove that one has not just money but taste.
Molly rejects this materialism. She values her own sizable inheritance only as a means to aid the poor and downtrodden, particularly in Third-World countries, and to annoy the American government. Her attempts to do both take her and her best friend, Bertie Einhorn, to depressed and besieged countries. "Loving Graham Greene" is the story of one of these journeys.
When Molly hears that her favorite writer, Graham Greene, has died, she decides to honor his memory by traveling to Algeria to offer money to some writers there who are threatened by Islamic fundamentalists. She knows that civil war is brewing and she wants them to hire bodyguards. The trip, however, is a series of amusing miscues and misadventures that does little good and much harm.
Like Ms. Emerson, Molly met and corresponded with the English novelist and critic of Third-World imperialism before he died in 1991. Ms. Emerson says he was a person of the highest principals. "He gave me hope for myself," she says. And he did for Molly as well.
Although Molly’s trip is a failure, Ms. Emerson believes it is possible to do good in the world and that Molly deserves credit for trying. "I think indifference is evil," she says stoutly. "We must keep trying. The effort is supreme."
