Joining the recent spate of books about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, all of which concern the sources of their poetry and their dysfunctional marriage, Middlebrook's is sure to be the gold standard. Astutely reasoned, fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius. Accessing newly available materials in the Hughes archives at Emory University, Middlebrook (Anne Sexton) offers fresh evidence of Hughes's beliefs in shamanism, psychic telepathy and the predatory instinct, and she breaks new ground in tracing the couple's interactive creative relationship, suggesting that neither would have produced his or her best poetry without the other. She shows how Hughes's faith in mysticism not only led him to believe that his marriage to Plath was fated, but also acted as a counterweight, inspiring him to seek his muse in erotic entanglements with other women. She conjectures that Plath, too, needed erotic aggression to release her creative impulses, demonstrating the particulars of her struggle with the conflicting demands of motherhood. And she effectively demolishes Hughes as the demon who destroyed Plath, stating that during their marriage he displayed "a high level of tolerance toward what other people considered... antisocial, crazy... behavior"; she also writes that Plath's emotional breakdown was a recurrence of the clinical depression that occasioned her first attempt at suicide in 1953. In the end, the book is most valuable in interpreting Hughes's sources of poetic inspiration and emotional behavior, and in providing a balanced assessment of the legacy of a troubled marriage and the works of art it engendered. Agent, Georges Borchardt. 8-city author tour. (On sale Oct. 13)
