THE LOVE MACHINE by Jacqueline Susann. 51 1 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.
It's only a matter of time before someone designs a thin, 9-in. by 6-in. portable TV set that opens like a book. Since 90% of all contemporary writers of fiction can do little more with language than concoct dialogue and make wordy pictures, Televolume might benefit writer and reader alike. Novels that normally take six to eight hours to read could be transformed into two hours of viewing simply by eliminating the need to read descriptions of aquiline noses, snowy breasts, silken haunches, the interminable lighting of cigarettes, pouring of drinks and brewing of coffee. Once liberated from the vestigial sanctity of hard covers, the popular novel could be promoted with the same big budgets and honest enthusiasm as any other mass entertainment.
One author who is not waiting for such technological innovations is Jacqueline Susann, a former utility actress and semicelebrity who finally got her share of limelight and lettuce (more than $1,000,000) by writing a book called Valley of the Dolls. Miss Susann's latest excitement is The Love Machine. A preposterously engaging sex-and-power fantasy targeted mainly at middle-aged females, The Love Machine is already nudging Portnoy's Complaint off the top of the bestseller lists, and should gross at least $2,000,000. In it, Miss Susann once again demonstrates her remarkable instinct for the varicose vein.
Valley was a pharmacological and gynecological nightmare. Reader interest, soaring along on a series of drug ingestions, couplings and nervous breakdowns, finally hit an apogee with breast cancer. Love Machine lacks Valley's primitive vigor but equals its obsession with pathology: leukemia, gall-bladder trouble, heart disease, neurasthenia and nymphomania play important roles. One man is terrified of losing his genitalia; another surrenders them gladly in order to become a woman. The central character, a power-mad television executive with a superhuman capacity for vodka and coitus, is mysteriously incapable of love and marriage. The explanation is only a cut above those delivered in Hollywood psychodramas of the 1940s in which a white-coated mental hygienist resolved the plot with a five-minute dissertation on the Oedipus complex.
As a novelist, Miss Susann unwittingly gravitates toward a caricature of naturalism, a relatively uncomplicated form of literary life born in the seminal spillage of Darwin's The Origin of Species and kept alive by public demand. Naturalism at best tends to project the human animal as an unappetizing accumulation of nerve endings and appetites. But in Miss Susann's handling, appetites consume the characters they inhabit, leaving nothing behind but a bad taste.
In a Delicatessen. With two huge successes in less than four years, Jacqueline Susann is thrusting past such bestseller fabricators as Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey and Leon Uris. She is now in a commercial sphere where fame matches fortune as a spur to effort.
"Money is applause," Miss Susann sums it up with characteristic baldness—and that must be the case.