Product Description

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329415 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-01
• Released on: 2002-12-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com Review
The motivating power of dream and the political price of illusions are the subject of Doris Lessing's extended family saga, The Sweetest Dream. While Frances Lennox, uncomplaining and unsentimental about her roles as a 1960s earth mother for a string of "screwed up" post-war children, serves up endless nurturing at the crowded kitchen table of a large North London house, her ex- husband pursues revolution on all-expenses-paid trips and conferences. Occasionally he drops by for free meals or to dump one of the children, or wives, of another failed marriage on Frances's doorstep. Lessing is able to turn a dispassionate eye on the economics of free love, in which women usually pay.

From swinging-'60s London to liberated sub-Saharan Africa, the author depicts the human faces of a broad canvas of issues in this polemical piece. The novel ranges from anorexia to AIDS to casting a questioning eye at the morality of the travelers on the World Bank gravy train. Moving from London to the tragic landscape of post-independence "Zimlia" (a thinly veiled Zimbabwe), Lessing documents the social movement and lost dreams of a post-war generation, for whom "it is always The Dream that counts." --Rachel Holmes, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
In lieu of writing volume three of her autobiography ("because of possible hurt to vulnerable people"), the grand dame of English letters delves into the 1960s and beyond, where she left off in her second volume of memoirs, Walking in the Shade. The result is a shimmering, solidly wrought, deeply felt portrait of a divorced "earth" mother and her passel of teenage live-ins. Frances Lennox and her two adolescent sons, Andrew and Colin, and their motley friends have taken over the bottom floors of a rambling house in Hampstead, London. The house is owned by Frances's well-heeled German-born ex-mother-in-law, Julia, who tolerates Frances's slovenly presence out of guilt for past neglect and a shared aversion for Julia's son, Johnny Lennox, deadbeat dad and flamboyant, unregenerate Communist. Frances's first love is the theater, but she must support "the kids," and so she works as a journalist for a left-wing newspaper. Over the roiling years that begin with news of President Kennedy's assassination, a mutable assortment of young habituEs gather around Frances's kitchen table, and Comrade Johnny makes cameo appearances, ever espousing Marxist propaganda to the rapt young dropouts. Johnny is a brilliantly galling character, who pushes both Julia and Frances to the brink of despair (and true affection for each other). Lessing clearly relishes the recalcitrant '60s, yet she follows her characters through the women's movement of the '70s and a lengthy final digression in '90s Africa. Lessing's sage, level gaze is everywhere brought to bear, though she occasionally falls into clucking, I-told-you-so hindsight, especially on the subject of the failed Communist dream. While the last section lacks the intimate presence of long-suffering Frances, the novel is weightily molded by Lessing's rich life experience and comes to a momentous conclusion. (Feb. 10)Forecast: A must for Lessing fans, this book carries echoes of much of her previous work, both novels and memoirs. New readers may well be attracted by her brisk, discerning view of the '60s and '70s.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Lessing leaves sf behind. It is the early Sixties, and Frances Lennox happily serves big meals to her teenaged sons, their friends, and whoever else happens to wander in off the street. But her "sweetest dream" is about to go sour.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Sweetest Dream, Laughable Reality
Doris Lessing is a writer of many locales and many genres. Of British parentage, she was born in Iran when it was called Persia. At age six she moved to Zimbabwe when it was called Rhodesia, and in 1949 she moved to London where she has remained ever since. In her 83 years, she's written over thirty books: realistic novels, science fiction novels, and some that she calls "inner-space novels." She's written plays, an opera libretto for Phillip Glass, and an autobiography.
Her latest realistic novel, The Sweetest Dream, begins in the early 1960s, and concerns Frances Lennox, a forth-something actress who has turned to journalism out of financial need. She has two adolescent sons. Their London house serves as a crash pad for teenagers with family troubles, so prevalent in the `60s. Frances' husband, Johnny, has abandoned her and the boys in order to pursue his own ambitions within the Communist Party. The story traces the gradual growth of all of the characters, youth and adult, into the late 1980s. Some remain in London, others go to the States, and still others wind up in Africa. Halfway through, the novel shifts direction and concerns itself with Sylvia, one of the flophouse kids, a once-anorexic waif who, having become a doctor, devotes her life to helping poor people with AIDS in Africa.
But the novel's first half deals mainly with London's Swinging Sixties. Lessing, herself once a `60s communist radical, is now deeply critical of the movement. In an interview with Salon, she has said, "We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks -- everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people." She's still incredulous at the current political correctness that has survived since the `60s. The Sweetest Dream seems to ask: did we really want our society torn down and rebuilt again by twenty-one year olds?
The sweetest dream that Lessing writes about is the dream of altruism, our dream of helping people, of serving others, of actively doing our parts to create a better, even a perfect world. What Lessing adds to the pot is that the character of altruism leans greatly upon the all-too-human personalities that practice it. Differing temperaments create different brands of social idealists.
Frances, for example, is the Good Mother whose instinct is to help wayward youth, to clothe, shelter and feed them. Her altruism falls naturally like rain, she cannot help but help. Her weakness is that she cannot say no. She is often taken advantage of and occasionally trounced all over. She has altruism with all heart and no head.
Her husband, Johnny, is altruism with all head and no heart. He is a young, charismatic Communist Party idealist whose dream is to unite the workers into an ideal society in which no one will suffer anymore. If it means sacrificing some individuals who get in the way, then so be it. Like many western European and American communists of his time, he remains in denial of Stalin's wholesale atrocities. Not to mention that, while he's out fighting to tear down the bourgeoisie, his sons remain fatherless at home.
Perhaps the novel's deepest flaw is that tends to meander. Anecdote gradually follows anecdote, and sometimes the reader is left wondering which was important and which wasn't. It reads like memories piled upon memories with very little rising drama, except for the question you might ask about any actual, living person: what will become of them in thirty years?
And this is what's compelling in The Sweetest Dream. The characters themselves are lively and varied. We watch them grow, or refuse to grow. Interestingly, the old adage that character is destiny only seems to apply to the novel's purely villainous characters. Communist Johnny remains a helpless, charming, deceitful dreamer until the end. Rose, the snot-nosed, vindictive teenager has become, appropriately, a tattletale journalist for a British tabloid. Lessing's villainous characters, lacking dimension, are unable to change into anything except self-caricatures. And it seems likely that the author intends it so.
But the more sympathetic characters such as Frances and her sons evolve in the most surprising and yet plausible ways. And even poor Sylvia, whose brand of altruism in Africa is rooted, like her anorexia, in a martyr's self-denial, changes in a most satisfying way. She grows from being helpless to being undeniably strong.
In showing the long-term evolution of her characters, Lessing has created a rich novel about personality and politics. In The Sweetest Dream, as in most of her work, there's a constant awareness that what at first seems only personal balloons into the political, and what's political affects us all in the most deeply personal ways.
For more writings of a literary nature, see www.maninquotes@blogspot.com

Many unanswered questions.
A good plot diluted with far too many sub-plots, some of which were rather contorted.
With remarkably few words this author can conjure up a vivid scene e.g.(pg.14)"she would go slowly upstairs, leaving behind her on the stale air the odours of flowers and expensive face powder." However, at other times the story is bogged down with far too much detail.
I liked some of the social and half-humorous statements that popped up from time to time. e.g the author's take on international conferences where "they get paid to travel to some beauty spot and talk nonsence....they take off every day to see the lions and the giraffes and the dear little monkeys and I don't think they notice the land is perishing from the drought." (437).
There were a vast number of characters in this book, making it difficult to keep track of everyone. What became of Clever and Zeberdee? We don't know. What became of Rose, the journalist,who came to Zimlia and tried to undermine and wreek havoc for Sylvia? That thread was dropped unceremoniously. Why so much attention to Colin's daughter, Celia, at the very end? Above all how does the name of the book fit this story?

Goodness shines out in a tawdry world
Doris Lessing - The Sweetest Dream.


In the first half of this splendid book we are back more or less in the territory of the author's The Good Terrorist. Frances Lennox, a middle -aged woman living in a large Hampstead house, presides unassertively over a large dinner table frequented by a group of 1960s youngsters brought home by her sons and who mostly belong to the radical left. Her Stalinist (later Maoist) ex-husband (irresponsibly abandoning wives and children seriatim) also drops in from time to time when he is not being a delegate in plushy hotels abroad, and plays the guru to the youngsters. Some rooms in the house become almost permanent squats for the young people who have often fallen out with their middle class families. Frances herself is a middle class left-wing Liberal; but she is unwilling to assert herself even when some of those who avail herself of her hospitality abuse her for being bourgeois and for belonging to an exploiting class. The politics of these youngsters are depicted as crude, their rhetoric based on clich s and slogans, their behaviour as selfish and self-indulgent. For instance, they defend their shop-lifting as an anti-capitalist activity. Clearly this novel is in part a scathing political tract against the radical left. But it is much more than that, as the psychology of Frances, of her sons, her mother-in-law, and each of the other young people is displayed with an insight which makes this a great novel and a captivating read.

In the second half of the book, in the 1980s, we move to "Zimlia", a newly liberated African country. Sylvia, Frances' step-daughter, has trained as a doctor and has then gone to work in a desperately poverty- and AIDS-stricken village in that country. In Zimlia we meet again some of the other youngsters who had sat around Frances' hospitable table: two of them, Africans who had been exiles from the country before its independence, are now in with the corrupt and incompetent government; three others have become leading figures in wealthy NGOs, moving importantly from one international gathering to another, and distributing largesse to the corrupt government without troubling to make sure that the money reaches the people who most need it. Again any possible resentment a reader might feel about being exposed to another political tract is likely to be overcome by the sheer brilliance with which the setting, the circumstances and the characters are described. Here, too, one knows that Doris Lessing is burning with rage about intellectual and political corruption, but, though there is nothing subtle about the political level of the book, her craft is such that one becomes deeply involved with and interested in the many people she so vividly portrays. The Sweetest Dream of a better world that black and white radicals had hoped for is cruelly dispelled in the shadow of Stalin, Mao, and tin-pot dictators in Africa, and Doris Lessing seems to say that it is an illusion to think we can transform the world by politics, but that individual acts of goodness and unselfishness can create pools of light in the surrounding darkness.