A Drifting Inertia
SEIDMAN, R. J.
A Drifting Inertia THE EDGE By Page Stegner Dial Press. 250 pp. $4.95. THE CREEP By Jeffrey Frank Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 202 pp. $4.50. THE DISCIPLE By Clark Brown Viking. 282 pp....
...In the least successful novel, The Edge by Page Stegner, autobiography causes a constriction, a cramping of the imagination...
...Three of these young novelists have written autobiographical stories...
...It is a simple story of a guy who fives in the East Village, a record of a weirdly comic existence that borders on and occasionally invades the absurd...
...But they are not so vehement toward more mature fiction, and their apparent schizophrenia reveals an interesting disposition: Autobiography can be splendid, and dramatic, if used well...
...Like the Creep, Ryan and Gordon Graves, Probish is passive...
...He watches passively, at times without interest, as the couple ranges over, around and upon the batdefield of his loyalty and his body...
...The boy remained on the burning deck, And pretty soon he was dead...
...Some writers, like Proust and Joyce, spend all their artistic lives refining private experience into metaphor and setting individual events into a larger artistic cosmos...
...But if a string of episodes does not make a novel, a character helps, and Probish is a real creation...
...Unlike the others, he is interesting, witty, intelligent, and has dimension...
...both writers fail because of the severe limitations they impose on their characters...
...None of this is exciting...
...Presumably the author sought to portray a perfectly unre-generate creep—and Frank's total exclusion of imagination does demonstrate a certain commendable tenacity...
...5.75...
...Structurally, the book may be faulted: It suffers, as do most American comic novels, from an episodic arrangement...
...Having just finished a session with his own girl, and feeling warm and expansive, Probish laughs along with a Puerto Rican couple as they happily hump on the other side of the thin plasterboard that separates the rooms...
...Pro-bish's effusion is not interpreted to his benefit, and leads from a voluble threat of castration to a series of Probish inventions intended to stave off this impending disaster...
...Throughout, the creep remains what someone finally gets around to calling him...
...Gordon's initiatives at the end of the novel, for instance, are ironically circumscribed...
...He serves principally as catalyst and whipping-boy in a power struggle involving Schroder, his teacher, and Mil, Schroder's worldly-wise, hot-pantsed wife...
...All are limited by the reduced size of their heroes and their concerns: The principle personalities in each story share a drifting inertia that seems characteristic of the attitudes of those currently under 30...
...There is no critical injunction against this, only against the kind of ellipsis that equates actuality with the writer's view of actuality...
...WHENCE ALL BUT HE HAD FLED By L. J. Davis Viking...
...These four novels are distinctly representative of their generation (the youngest author, Jeffrey Frank, is 26...
...there is no color, no idiosyncracy, not even a tiny perversion...
...both exhaustively describe the actions of all-too-dull characters in all-too-familiar situations...
...there is no real plot, although things have a way of happening to Probish, the hero...
...in Beckett, after all, the dramatization of boredom is never boring...
...The sages throw up their hands at a first work and hurl the imprecation, "Autobiography...
...This process is partially a matter of expertise and partially unavailable to analytic methods...
...247 pp...
...Reviewed by R. J. SEIDMAN On his way to the completed first novel the writer meets a problem that will dog him the rest of his literary life—the relation of autobiography to the dramatic...
...and you know virtually everything else that will befall him...
...Indeed, their book jackets suggest the strong parallels between their writing and their experience...
...So are his friends and neighbors...
...to make that constructed world come alive for others, to make particularized events transcend their own particulars, is nearly magical...
...Neither Jeffrey Frank nor Clark Brown completely realize the secondary theme of their books, the personal growth of the hero...
...In spite of hyperbolic event, the internal logic of each incident is consistent...
...When he finally goes off to become his own man, escaping at last from his adopted family, he does so for several wrong reasons...
...Rendering event too literally, the author confuses personal with public drama...
...The unsympathetic reader might even argue that Whence is only as good as each scene, and some of the scenes are not entirely successful...
...What is or was meaningful and important to the author must be made meaningful and important to his readers...
...To construct a consistent world is difficult...
...Having contemplated that trip themselves, they should...
...The best novel of the four, Whence All But He Had Fled by L. J. Davis, is the least pretentious...
...What bothers the reader, and plagues the young novelist, is the failure to transport an incident from its original circumstance to a more public fictional reality...
...Inevitably, the climax thrusts him into the naked couple's room to help hold up the plasterboard wall, their common illusion of privacy...
...Davis has created a varied group of people and placed them in unorthodox yet possible circumstances...
...The book exhibits great humor and inspired comic flashes...
...In The Edge the chief character is one-dimensional, never superceding his stereotype...
...The author intends his hero to be dull and to move in a barren urban hell, an almost placeless, timeless, lonely city setting...
...the oldest, Clark Brown, 33...
...You don't know the best friend will have an accident that night, but you do know Ryan will end up in the sack with the chick (as he does with all chicks...
...The novel flaunts its terrible title, quoted from "a stupid poem" Probish makes up in a moment of stress: The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled...
...In sum, this is a limited book well done, an almost comforting performance because of the humanity of the writer and his characters...
...Along with one of the few truly interesting descriptions of an lsd trip, Whence offers glimpses of a new generation of Jews, refreshingly liberated from the overstylized schle-miels of Bellow, Roth and Malamud...
...yet he is rather more infatuated with his character than some of his readers will be...
...Stegner's heart is in the right place, for he disapproves of Ryan's irresponsibility...
...5.75...
...He ends up in bed with the fiancee of his best friend on the fateful night the friend drives off the road...
...Ryan, Steg-ner's heroic anti-hero, wanders through all the usual debaucheries and irresponsibilities of the generation just before today's reigning pot people...
...Problems" may be putting it too strongly, for Gordon, to an even greater extent than the other central characters in these novels, is a cipher...
...We minutely examine every manifestation of his creepness —his uninspired paranoia, his pallid fearsj his feeble ruminations...
...The fourth, Jeffrey Frank, has drawn heavily upon what I assume to be his urban adolescence, although his principal character is obviously not a direct reflection of himself...
...The hero of Clark Brown's The Disciple, Gordon Graves, faces more representative if slightly more bizarre problems in nicely sketched settings of Paris, Madrid and Seville...
...New York is the model for this Inferno, and Frank gets mileage by opposing the reader's knowledge of it to the mist-shrouded world of his character...
...But the crosspur-pose works a little too directly, too tightly in a one-to-one correlation...
...With Jeffrey Frank the imitative-ness is self-conscious and willed...
...The novels end similarly with a cynical suggestion that though the character thinks he is going off on a significant voyage of self-discovery, the authors know better...
...The book is further diminished by a fault it shares with Jeffrey Frank's The Creep: Both offer imitative answers to problems that have become contemporary cliches...
...But he could have explored more satisfying, though more difficult, possibilities...
...Thus Probish lies whimpering on the floor, unable to speak or open the door, while two of his friends stand outside discussing how much Probish dislikes dogs...
...Gordon is amusingly, credulously caught between them, not quite understanding Schroder's limitations or Mil's fears...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 9
