Take Five

...An intelligent survey of economic ideas that promises to improve the "wealth of natioos," Tomorrow, Capitalism is about the very foundations of a free society...

...Spiritually, Simon travels a great distance in this novel...

...The doldrums led to an obsession with an image from his boyhood reading, the image of Huck Finn on a raft on the Mississippi River...

...The problem, however, will be not the theme but the context...

...White is obviously ignorant...

...On the upper river t h e r e are moments of huckleberry transcendence-moments when he can fish, or sing, or pull into a slough and read John Cheever...

...He who has wanted everything and has had faith in no one must be ready for the great passage from Matthew when shortly before their marriage Merry recites it to him: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink: nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on . . . . " It is not a question whether Simon is worth saving...

...A capitalism where economic and social policies are decided in a free market unfettered by centralized and intrusive government...

...Throughout most of the novel Simon is such an exureranf fIdmouth that for many rea~lers the theme will be contaminated rather than once more validated...

...The spirit of the SAVE UP TO 90% ON PERFUNES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta, 1000, L ' A i r du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, N 0 r e l l . Halstotl N i g h t . etc...

...I can already hear the calliope emitting preliminary toots...

...Not until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 1984 will I be able to formulate the law more precisely...

...Even Merry Allen the priest, the agency of grace who teaches Simon gentleness and who is for me an attractive character, is too inclined to use the cliches of the foulmouth world (even Simon agrees that they do not become her...

...the grateful victim promises help and induces Simon to experiment with a drug that leaves him without his sense of smell...

...White as having a chance to be the first Italian-American to become President of the United States as well as Yale ? (No college president can ever quite put Woodrow Wilson out of his mind...

...The obsession suggested a trip and a book proposal worthy of the Master, RLS himself...

...Shortly after completing his Arabian book, Raban found himself in the doldrums, unable to write...

...Sad to say, the exhaustion is most pronounced among the literary bohemians, once a flourishing and exuberant tribe...

...It will not be easy for them to distinguish Take Five from novels like Robert Coover's The Public Burning or Joseph Heller's GoodAs Gold, which present hyped up and farcified pictures of a scabrous world so closed in on itself that skillfully managed pratfalls must substitute for Fortunate Falls...

...I have n.ever met Ronald Reagan, but suppose I do...

...It is long (583 pages), hard to get into, and hard to staywith...

...Mano belongs with the p u t t e r - i n n e r s . Given his need to dramatize the unselective cancerous nature of the modern imagination cut loose from its theological moorings, the excessiveness is no doubt hard to avoid...

...It ought to be a swell election...

...The question is whether in the novel the saving is ruined by g r a t u i t o u s n e s s . I d o n ' t think it is, but Simon's coming home is a long and sometimes exasperating haul...

...Each time he begins feeling too comfortable, he is attacked by mosquitoes or a squadron of dive-bombing birds...

...Already translated into six languages, Tomorrow, Capitalism is an international best-seller...

...It is his need to get funds to complete this raffish enterprise that precipitates the action...

...These are the talents that lead others--Herman Wolff the producer, for instance--to call him a genius, but they also lead Merry Allen, in a moment of exasperation, to refer to his "diarrhea of the mouth...

...OLD GLORY: AN AMERICAN VOYAGE .Jonathan Raban / Simon and Schuster / $16 95 John S. Peterson There is no denying that AngloAmerican travel writing has become a spent genre...

...His imagination is crammed with information about that world in all its categoi-ies: sports, politics, literature, drama, religion, history...

...Tomorrow, Capitalism shows that if we are to solve the problems of poverty, unemployment, pollution, underproductivity, and crime we must work towards a true capitalism...

...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 31 pun runs wild in it...

...necessarily make a good story...

...But the river demands constant vigilance and Raban is a long way from suburban Connecticut...

...Take Five, his seventh novel, is not likely to change this situation...

...TOMORROW, CAPITALISM The Economics of Economic Freedom by Henri Lepage A Conservative Book Club Selection $14.95 From...

...There a r e time breaks between episodes, but once we are in a n e p i s o d e , and Simon's cancer of the consciousness takes command, absolutely everything that comes to his a t t e n t i o n , including sounds of all sorts, is reproduced in words...

...Simon's diarrhea of the mouth is an impressive virtuoso display on the part of the author, but'it is also why the novel is so long...

...This is not Mano's way...

...The plot would be written by the current of the river itself_9 It would carry me into John S. Peterson is a New York writer at work on an essay collection entitled "Social IVork & Other 70s Fables...

...having finagled his way into a meeting with a wealthy and powerful producer, he arranges a mugging scenario with two of his movie crew so that he can further his cause by rescuing the producer...

...utterly incapacitated now, capable only of faint dictation into a cassette player, he dies--thunders into Paradise, we are told in the last sentence, as if it were a china shop...

...Like Simon of Cyrene (the epigraph is from Luke's gospel), he is recruited out of nowhere to help carry the cross...

...Paul tells the Romans it must be, without dissimulation...

...I call it "Bishop's law," and it provides that no politician whom I have actually met can be elected President...

...Simon who loses all he ever wanted ends up with more than he ever bargained for because "Grace, the lawless," " t h e soultease," the trickster that delights in It's sophisticated_9 It's for those who read and like to understand what they read and for those, who wish to add precision and eloquence to their speech and writings...

...Simon the great dissimulator must be seen as aware of the irony that he has been saved by a love that is, as St...

...Episcopalian priest, mistaking her for the daughter of a millionaire...

...But perhaps the marvelous verbal life should be taken as a given, the _9 important thing being that Simon's passage from the obscene to the sacred is a triumph of metaphor...

...Here I must break new ground: There is working against the Senator a political law of which Mr...

...But where does what Merry Allen calls " t h e marvelous verbal life" come from...

...Tomorrow, Capitalism explains in layman's language how the economic trailblazers in the vanguard of this revolution--Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and F.A...

...The Democratic party of the United States is not " t h e world's oldest continuous living p a r t y " : The British Tories can trace their ancestry at least to Queen Anne's time, when their leader, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, invented the spoils system...

...M i l t o n Friedman The last 20 years have witnessed a stunning revolution in economic thought...

...Does it work only when I have no intention of eliminating the candidate...

...at $16.00 per oz...

...Storms and high winds force him to hole up in a s t r i n g o f w a t e r - 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982...

...Mano will upset some of his fellow Christians much as Graham Greene upset some of his fellow Catholics with novels like Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Heart o f the Matter...

...The r e a d e r must be willing to accept Simon's associative talents as an adequate preparation for, even an anticipation of, the breaking in of lawless grace, and if he cannot he will be put off by the lack of parity between Simon's beginning and end...

...No one gets around much anymore...

...If so, Kennedy will not be affected (though I think I hexed him in 1980), but Brown and Giamatti are out of it...

...Simon's associative t a l e n t s , especially his visual talents, are remarkable," we are told by the omniscient observer, who of course displays the same talents in his own voice...

...Mano writes as if he takes metaphor Over I00,000 copies sold worldwide...

...However, two conditions cooperate to accelerate the pace so that, apart from the skillfully managed flashbacks, very little chronological time is involved: He has little ability to restrain his insatiable appetites, and he is cast in the role of the traditional picaro who must live by his wits outside the law...

...Such notions are commonplace among the orthodox left-liberal reporters who have been elevat.ed to the peerage as "media personalities," and I criticize Mr...

...The diarrhea is repeated in the narrative technique...

...Eliot: " I n my end is my beginning...

...Judging by the sighs from Greenwich Village, no one here at home has the energy to bay at the moon or embark on a Whitmanesque tramp...

...It was only after Nelson Rockefeller's final failure that I began to suspect the existence of die law...

...TAKE FIVE D. Keith Mano / Doubleday / $17.95 John P. Sisk H i t h e r t o , I gather, D. Keith Mano's work has been more highly regarded by critics than readers...

...Where the river meandered, so would the book . . . . Everything would be left t o chance_9 T h e r e ' d be no advance reservations, no letters of introduction...

...after acknowledging his sins and forgiving his enemies he is married to his beau. tiful priest...

...Please add $1 75 for shlpprng ano handling to all orders J as seriously as Shakespeare does: not as a game that enlivens the confining prison house of language, but as an indispensable access to a reality beyond...

...In Raban's mind, "The book and journey would be all of a piece...

...256 pages...

...Mercifully, Raban becomes somewhat adept at dodging barges and logs...

...Before I knew that I had this dreadful power, I killed Hubert Humphrey's chances at a cockthil party in 1947, and Estes Kefauver's a few years later...

...his "Cancer of the c o n s c i o u s n e s s . . . . I can't pick up a paper clip but it's attached to all the others in the jar...

...Anyone doubting this is invited to draw up a list of travel books written during the seventies that bear rereading...

...In a recent interview with Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene speaks of his discovery that "the right way was the way of Simplicity, straight sentences, no involutions, no ambiguities...

...To begin a fascinating odyssey into that wonderful world of words, send 50r in stamps for brochure to LOGOPHILIA UNLIMITED, Box 11344-A, Palo Alto CA 94306...

...So we have again one of the greatest of Christian themes: the Fortunate Fall...

...White uses the word "gay" without quotation marks to describe homosexuals, thereby contributing to the corruption O f an honest and useful adjective for which there is no precise synonym...

...MasterCard and American Express cards acceptod...

...he is balked in his attempt to seduce the beautiful priest, having persuaded her to descend with him into a drainpipe in a park playground, just as he had earlier been balked by a cast iron chastity belt in his attempt to score with a temporary member of his crew...

...What about A. Bartlett Giamatti, who is mentioned by Mr...

...Ultimately, the central figure in Take Five is the omniscient observer, but immediately it is Simon Lynxx, a free-lance film maker who has two prize-winning short subjects to his credit, and who as the story opens has filmed one scene of an ambitious "counter-epic" to be called Jesus 2001...

...I think lie might have left out a lot, but he might respond, as Wolfe did to Fitzgerald, "that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners--greater putterinners, in fact, than they were taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put i n . " And I must concede that, among other things, Mano puts in an astonishing number and variety of characters...

...No one, at any rate, quite like Jonathan Raban...

...The result often is a regrettable lack of staging, so that comic moments, of which t h e r e are many, tend to blur into one another_9 One is reminded of F. Scott F i t z g e r a l d ' s distinction between novelists who like himself are leaver-outers and novelists like Thomas Wolfe who are putter-inners...

...he disguises himself as a black film maker in an unsuccessful attempt to bilk a funding organization...

...The Haydn-Mozart concert on the airplane's communication system no doubt helped...

...Hayek, and members of the "Public Choice" School--have reshaped the science of economics into a comprehensive ap- . proach to the study of human problems...

...he is beaten up and hospitalize,., by the muggers he had employed to mug the producer, they now being in the employ of the latter who has discovered the fraud...

...He apparently believes that a C h r i s t i a n ' s faith in metaphor should be in analogy with Merry Allen' s faith in Christ...

...I was 200 pages into it and 35,000 feet in the air somewhere between Chicago and Salt Lake before I began to feel at home with it...

...Can J e r r y Brown overcome his reputation as a flake ? Is Chappaquiddick yet forgotten...

...I'm telling you, man, you get to N'Orleans, you can send me a f-----' postcard...

...White only because he is a much better than ordinary political writer...

...Send for free sample and fragrance list...

...After grinning through six departure takes for a local TV station, he finds h i m s e l f alone on the Mississippi...

...serving those first who come last, has broken in on him...

...It all happens in the present tense (which can be tiresome even though it intensifies the nowness, the urgency of the story) and with reversed pagination (which can be an inconvenience for the reviewer...

...He the unmitigated sensualist must also live without his sense of taste after mistaking gasoline for olive oil at a cookout for his movie crew and setting his mouth on fire--an accident that, oddly enough, only aggravates his logorrhea...

...There are just too many paper clips in the jar and Simon, the overreacher, wants them all...

...Toward the end Simon himself refers to...

...I can hardly wait for the 1982 campaign...

...There i s a n o t h e r problem with Simon, who though he is not a figure in a realistic novel is still displayed as a particular person with a history in the " r e a l " world...

...badly crippled, incontinent, impotent, with his hearing impaired and about to lose his sight, suffering from the discovery that he is an orphan, he then refuses the three million the producer offers him to make a film...

...your local bookseller or: - Open Court Publishing Company Box 599 La Salle, IL 61301 Toll-Free Number: (800) 435-6850 VISA...

...It will be too religious for many confirmed secularists, too often bawdy and obscene for many believers...

...Both devices, I suspect, are intended to reinforce the thematic paradox so memorably stated in "East Coker" by the converted Simon's co-religionist T.S...

...So handicapped and desperate for money, Simon then tricks his way into an acquaintance with a beautiful THESAURUS AT PLAY fHE LAST WORD tN WORD GAMES John P. Sisk is Arnold Professor of the Humanities at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...It's hard to imagine Simon ever sitting still long enough to read anything--certainly not that great punster, Shakespeare, with whom he is so familiar...

...I would try to be as much like a piece of human driftwood as I could manage . . . And so, in September 1979, the dreamy Englishman arrives in Min~neapolis to pick up a 16-foot motorboat and begin his book...

...His view of the Vietnam war seems to me rather more naive (e.g., South Vietnam was a "fictitious country," the Tet offensive of 1968 was a great military victory for North Vietnam) than is proper for an intelligent and weltinformed man in 1982...

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...long pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on shore...

...90 Water St., Dept...

...In 1980 1 went out of my way to shake Edward M. Kennedy's hand and look him in the eye...

...Men's colognes too...

...His novel is at times as hard to read as Finnegan's Wake, and for some of the same reasons...

...Across the water, of course, the vitality is even lower...

...In 1980 Teddy Kennedy wrongly thought it was, but by 1984 fifteen years will have passed...

...In the hundred years since Robert Louis Stevenson penned his magnificent essay, "An Apology For I d l e r s , " much has happened to dampen the spirits of British bohemia...

...With his cancerous consciousness he often suggests a frenetic polymath...

...Since he is a driven man, an utter hedonist frankly without principle who hates only two things in life, .poverty and boredom, he quickly gets into the right kind of story-trouble and stays there until he arrives at an absolutely unforeseen point of rest...

...in the Christiafi economy the worst of us are, which is good news but does not...

...Six miles downstream one can understand why the New York Times has tagged Raban as a "brilliant tragic-comedian of t r a v e l . " In Lock One he nearly capsizes in the wake of a barge, prompting an enraged lockman to shout: "N'Orleans...

...Tomorrow, Capitalism The Economics of Economic Freedom by Henri Lepage " . . . a remarkable tour de f o r c e . . , comprehensive, accurate, and yet accessible to the general public...

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