| The New Corn Goddess is an 88,000 word novel. A limited third-person narrative, four journals containing forty-six entries, and a variety of lists relate the protagonist Irene's confrontation with new surroundings and her irrational self. Her personal journal offers a more intimate narrative. "The New York Journal" relates Irene's imagined life in New York, thus illuminating her past struggles. In "The Painting Journal" she plans future paintings. "The Pendayhaz Journal," which has just one entry, ambiguously concludes the novel, being either a summation of events or an imaginative wish fulfillment.;Irene's husband rekindles an old affair when he returns to his hometown of Pendayhaz, Iowa. Irene attempts to integrate into the community, but turns increasingly to her painting. She is pursued sexually by Joey, who cuts her lawn, her exercise partner Carla, and a landscape gardener Lyle, who all are aware of Tom's infidelity. Irene has several altercations with the neighborhood children. She becomes more involved in her painting. Tom leaves her and she writes "The Pendayhaz Journal." In "The New York Journal" she achieves a successful career, develops relationships with a friend Maria Elena and her cousin Jens, and leaves Tom. After attaining what she wants in her fantasy New York, she ends "The New York Journal." In "The Pendayhaz Journal" the characters in the town make dramatic changes, Irene begins to have success locally, and the neighborhood girls come to consider Irene a goddess. She reveals in the final paragraph that she now has conversations with Jens, who has been dead for years.;The major themes of the novel are the construction of self through interaction and memory, provincialism, being the other, the rational and irrational self, human sexuality, and the relationship between art and thought.;The critical introduction discusses the process of writing The New Corti Goddess, Doris Lessing's influence on the structure, Virginia Woolf's, Nathanael West's, and Margaret Atwood's literary models of the protagonist as painter, and the theme of personal identity in The New Corn Goddess . |
