Darling Clementine is the story of Samantha, a poetess determined to transform her sex life into a meditation: a pathway to enlightenment. Along for the ride is her brand new husband, Arthur Clementine, a wealthy, calm, but crypto-zany assistant district attorney for New York County. The novel begins with their meeting and works its way backward and forward. In the past, a series of darkening love affairs lead Sam to a suicide attempt and a breakdown. Now, Samantha works on a suicide hotline and uses her marriage in a search for radical sanity, a sort of road show of Love’s Body. Along the way, she reconciles polymorphous perversity with housework; tries to talk one of William Blake’s deities out of killing himself—or someone else; and watches, with everyone else, as the world moves toward the ever popular brink of destruction. Darling Clementine is an effervescent combination of Henry Miller and P. G. Woodhouse, in a character as daffy and enchanting as Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly was in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
