Books: Mopping Up the Good Terrorist

A year ago, Doris Lessing made the startling announcement that she had recently written two novels published under the pseudonym of Jane Somers. She said that she had engineered this hoax to demonstrate how hard it is for new authors to gain an audience. She also wanted an unprejudiced response to her fiction, "to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside." This may seem a rather downbeat response to a worldwide reputation, but the point is valid. Lessing's reviewers and readers, familiar with such works as The Golden Notebook...