Bright Lights, Big City

...CATHOLICISM IN CRISIS A Journal of Lay Catholic Opinion Name Address City/State Zip *El 1 year(11 issues) only $19.95 *11 2 years (22 issues) only $36.00 * f 3 years (33 issues) only $49.00 El 1 year student/senior $10.00 11 Please bill me...

...The policy of containment, for instance, which according to its foremost theorist, George Kennan, was supposed to confront the Russians "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world," has obviously not succeeded in bottling up the Soviet Union within its borders...

...Welles has usually known with whom he could push an initial advantage...

...It almost goes without saying that he adapted, designed, and directed this theater montage himself and that because he had the demands of a perfectionist he asserted his authority over the cast with the benevolent despotism of a Genghis Khan...

...Ransom believed that he would become a different person, better somehow, if he kept training...

...Aged ten, Orson was lodged by his guardian, Bernstein, with a German psychologist, from whom he was short ly forced to flee when it became obvious that his body, not his mind, was the primary object of Herr Professor's interest...

...Ransom thought, was his own movie now"), the prose is for the most part gracefully wrought...

...Maurice Bernstein, who was then virtually installed in the Welles's household and who would become a lifelong mentor of and nuisance to Orson, from 1916 to 1958-when he died Vernon Young is a writer living in Philadelphia...

...Barbara Learning has written a 562-page biography of him, based on two-year interview sessions with the man, himself, together with testimony from everyone alive, it seems like, who encountered Welles for five minutes (in the spirit of "I once knew a man who saw Shelley...

...If this is arms control, what's an arms race...

...As for the view that by expanding economic cooperation with the Soviet Union, we could curb Soviet expansionism by entangling it in a "web of interest," that, too, has proved illusory...

...If I were you, I'd do it today...

...The eponymous hero of McInerney's second novel, Ransom, has little in common with his immediate predecessor, except that both partake in the American literary tradition of backing away from sex at the last minute (cf...

...That's why I would carry Catholicism in Crisis magazine with me everywhere...

...K. Chesterton DO YOU KNOW ME...

...The writing is more restrained than in Bright Lights, Big City...

...Nowhere else could I find such a lively collection of in-' sightful commentary, crucial documentation, timely reviews and brilliant essays...

...But what saddens me is that the tradition I cherished, and tried so much to be a part of, has often been forgotten along with me...

...El Gift MasterCard-Visa Name on Card Account No...

...The West has proved largely incapable of dealing effectively with Soviet expansionism, is subject to all sorts of illusions, and to top it all, is spiritually impoverished...

...El from falling off a ladder while pruning a tree...

...Considering the frequency with which artists and intellectuals insist that their childhood was miserable and their adolescence unbearable, Orson Welles is a dazzling exception...

...While there are lapses into chic journalisms (a telephone is described as "Ransom's major electronic interface with the rest of the world") and cliche ("But this, It is probably as true today as it was in 1952 when Orson Welles, with himself in mind, obviously, began a novel (Mr...

...it is like visiting an amusement park the morning after and seeing the faded sign boards and flaked paint on the Tilt-aWhirl...

...The reader becomes impatient to return to the bad behavior...

...Why not give a gift subscription...

...Thin enough to slip under a door, and sporting a cover which deliberately mimics a New Wave rock album, the book has achieved the pale literary equivalent of going triple platinum...

...Ah, but I envy you...

...Today it seems clear that, in essence, detente marked a return to the illusions of Yalta: If only the West would treat Moscow like a responsible member of the international community, Moscow would reciprocate by behaving like a responsible member of the international community...

...Crozier and his colleagues presumably believe that such a policy would ultimately be pointless-nothing can dislodge the entrenched power of the Nomenklatura...

...About what first novel in recent years could this be said...

...Nor has the West's other grand strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, detente, fared any better...

...I'm told all you need do is fill out and mail in the form below...

...He can at least paint some frenetic behavior, and it is a subculture with a vivid technical vocabulary...

...The moral commercials do not work because what Lawrence liked to call the "passional inspiration" of the book has nothing to do with right and wrong...

...Unfortunately, in trying to write a real novel, instead of the fictional equivalent of a rock video, McInerney proves unable to create a moral world with any more subtlety than that inhabited by Godzilla...

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...The tale brings to mind Philip Larkin's ironic verses about how the lives of the young today seem "a brilliant breaking of the bank/A quite unloseable game...

...The book has been dubbed the first Yuppie novel...

...Holden Caulfield) and both are trying to get over something terribly sad which happened to them before the first chapter...

...it is not simply a biography in the chronological sense, where he was when, it's a compendium of Welles's own opinions of where he was when...

...But McInerney feels obliged to apply the moral brakes anyway and-well, they have never been connected in the first place...

...The other emotional hurt driving our hero is presented in a series of flashbacks to the Afghan border a few years earlier, where Ransom had been the unintentional accomplice in the death-by-overdose of a woman who is so flipped out that the reader cares neither about her nor Ransom's guilt over the incident...

...No one has produced a full-scale history of Orson, man and boy, and it will be completely unnecessary now for anyone else to attempt it...

...All really great novels assume a moral universe...

...They can only amuse us within the narrow bounds of their selfindulgence...

...Welles's father, Richard, had retired in disappointment from a lucrative career as an inventor and was assuaging his regrets for not having become a multi-millionaire by drinking himself into the grave...

...Like Crozier and his col leagues, Pipes has a very realistic view of Soviet foreign policy...

...The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy's Complaint, a critic once observed, is to read it twice...

...You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head...

...The legendary attributes of the Welles we've heard of seem to have been initiated shortly after his birth (in 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin) by a Dr...

...Under these circumstances, there can hardly be any doubt as to the ultimate outcome of the East West struggle...

...You can say this at least for the switch from marijuana to cocaine as the controlled substance of choice: It produces funnier lines...

...The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M...

...If the other boys condoned his dictatorial guise it was because en couraged by Skipper [i.e., Hill] they all self-consciously saw themselves as somehow sharing with the prodigy a ORSON WELLES: A BIOGRAPHY Barbara Learning/Viking/$19.95 Vernon Young 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...

...Books already exist on the subject of Welles but they are mainly critiques or loose adulations of his theater and film productions...

...There was, by the way, an older brother, who seems to have been something of a loony...

...Hoping to dazzle Hill with his acting prowess, as he would be unable to do with his lesser talent for basketball, he launched a succession of plays in which, according to a fellow-student, he played Cassius, Mark Antony, Richard III, Dr...

...Like a lot of young writers today, Jay McInerney is very clever but has no real idea as yet about how to go to work on what Lionel Trilling called "the recalcitrant stuff of life...

...is not worth keeping on the shelves even as flower child memorabilia...

...They do not take vacations-they go on "detox sabbaticals...

...it is no more incredible than a host of anecdotes in his marathon of nine lives...

...Do Crozier and his colleagues genuinely believe that the West is doomed...

...Everybody wanted me...

...And while it is still possible, nowadays, to speak of "selective containment," that is, the defense of certain vital strategic zones, Kennan's prediction that containment would lead, after fifteen years or so, to the collapse of the Soviet regime has proved spectacularly wrong...

...With Brezhnev's detente came the invasion of Czechoslovakia, crueller measures against Soviet dissidents, and an ever widening spread of subversion and terror...

...From my earliest childhood," Welles has confessed, "I was the Lillie Langtry of the older homosexual set...

...and the denial of economic and other forms of aid...

...Professor Pipes would thus have the West pursue a "coordinated policy of economic denial" vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...

...After his early infatuation with Beatrice Welles, a beauty, a feminist, and a literary intellectual, he became increasingly alienated from her by his ingrained contempt for the arts (she was also an accomplished musician...

...As for the efficacy of recent arms control accords in curbing the Soviets, one statistic says it all: In 1970, when SALT I was being negotiated, the Soviet Union had about 1,400 strategic warheads...

...This is not to say that a novelist should ignore the distinction between right and wrong...

...The alternative is really much too depressing to contemplate...

...The West can promote these forces by a combination of active resistance to Soviet expansion...

...At the same time it is, I'll risk saying inevitably, the most enthralling book ever, in my recollection, about show business, especially about movie show-business...

...The fiction which issued from the discovery of marijuana in the sixties (remember Thumb Tripping...

...It was his way of knowing himself...

...Public speaking and sports were stressed equally, both of them supervised by Roger Hill, who was instantly and for years thereafter as impressed by Welles as Welles was by him...

...So many issues desperately need treatment from a Catholic perspective in the tradition of such giants as Acton and Maritain and, dare I say it, even me...

...With all tradi tional values pushed to the side, the inhabitants of this demi-monde are free to indulge themselves at newsreel speed...

...Crozier, Middleton, and Murray-Brown are wrong...

...Unfortunately, Crozier and his co-authors seem to rule out this alternative as well...

...He played "a somewhat less artistic role," as Miss Learning puts it, costumed as a rabbit in front of Marshall Field's department store, murmuring periodically to passers-by, "Dear me, I must hurry-or else it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...And so, at each stage, the story repeats itself...

...On the contrary, "After Yalta and Potsdam came the extinction of political life in Eastern Europe, culminating in the communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948...

...There we have it, then: The Soviet system is inherently expansionist, and cannot be reformed...

...I thought it would embarrass them if I said I wasn't homosexual, that would be a rebuke, so I always had a headache...

...There are holes in their boots and they are hungry...

...A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already...

...The karate kid neither smokes nor drinks and he goes to bed early...

...The Stalinist system now prevailing in the Soviet Union has outlived its usefulness," Professor Pipes writes, and "the forces making for change are 'Available in paperback from Simon and Schuster/Touchtone Books, $9.95...

...Yet the logic of their argument suggests a deeply-held historical pessimism, a pessimism memorably articulated by Whittaker Chambers, who once told his wife that in going from the Communist to the anti-Communist camp, he was knowingly choosing the losing side...

...The conclusion seems inescapable, therefore, that if containment doesn't work, if detente doesn't work, if summitry doesn't work, and if arms control doesn't work, the only way the West can curb Soviet expansionism is by helping to promote some sort of internal transformation of the Soviet system which would reduce the power of the Nomenklatura and increase the power of Soviet society...

...Far from blowing his prospects and money up his nose, Christopher Ransom is in Japan studying the martial arts...

...The story of a young New Yorker's slide down the evil powdered slope appears to have keen resonance for MBA's who earn twice their age...

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...The book has its incidental pleasures...

...But the moral conflicts in this novel are too simple, too programmatic, to engage a mature reader...

...I, for one, am willing to believe in Welles's infantine coherence...

...McInerney is quite good at depicting the hollowness of expatriate life, and his portrait of the modern Japanese, a race not entirely comfortable with its recent veneer of Western values, is convincing...

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...While we are not surprised to hear that precocity in most things was a feature of Welles's growing-up, the mind does boggle when we are told that after his mother's death he spent four weeks with her relatives, and his girl cousins initiated him sexually, at the age of nine...

...With the failure of both the carrot (detente) and the stick (containment) to bring about any appreciable change in Soviet behavior, many in the West have pinned their hopes on two new panaceas: summits and arms control...

...Although Crozier and his colleagues readily grant that over the course of the Cold War, the West has enjoyed a few good innings, the record that emerges from their study of Soviet-American relations is, by-and-large, a melancholy one...

...they con sume sex like a fast food, and are hardly able to walk down the street without "hoovering" a few lines of coke first...

...I devoured Bright Lights, Big City when it came out a year ago and hesitated recently before reading it again...

...I sincerely hope that Professor Pipes is right, and that Messrs...

...And by some of the best of your writers...

...The novel ends with the sort of melodramatic violence which is the obvious escape route for a novelist whose characters don't really have much to do with each other...

...The opening takes us right into the dark heart of the new Manhattan night...

...Needless to say, things haven't quite worked out that way...

...They need to be fed...

...Bruce Jay Friedman wrote a very funny novel about cocaine called About Harry Towns, which deserves to return to print, and David Rabe's Broadway play, Hurlyburly, while finally a disaster, has some very funny writing...

...In 1916 the doctor, so goes his story, had looked in at the nursery and the eighteen-months-old Orson had declared roundly, "The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals...

...The quirky second-person singular narra tion works against all odds...

...As soon slip moral judgments into a rock video...

...Since we can scarcely believe that Wisconsin was uniquely rampant with homosexuality in the twenties, Welles's report suggests that if everyone were as frank as he about his boyhood vicissitudes, a considerable number of American communities would be revealed as crypto-gay...

...Miss Learning's is the real copious thing-if a fantastic subject may be defined as real at all...

...becoming well-nigh irresistible...

...There will be less excuse hereafter for not knowing much about Mr...

...Not the author, who probably had the most fun writing about his hero's worst moments...

...Hyde, and Jesus Christ...

...Only John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind...

...He falls in with a set of other young Americans who are all trying what Thomas McGuane (an obvious influence on McInerney) has dubbed "the Rand-McNally approach to self-discovery"--in this case burning a three-year hole on their resumes in order to do a little Zen and drugrunning...

...McInerney seems to be enjoying himself, but he might want to go back and read the cautionary George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...the rhythm is just right: You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning...

...A novelist who wishes to depict people rapidly amortizing their brain cells is far bet ter off dealing with a stimulant like cocaine...

...But as Crozier and his co-authors note, summit meetings have never produced any positive gains for the West...

...A year after the 1955 meeting in Geneva came the brutal crushing of the Hungarian bid for freedom...

...After Vietnam in 1961 came the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis, as though Khrushchev were deliberately giving the young Kennedy a slap in the face...

...0 Catholicism in Crisis, P.O...

...or call (219) 239-6603 49 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 producing a minor, if entertaining, work...

...The narrative begins to swerve into the service lane-characters with Good Values are introduced...

...The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge...

...Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where he was sent to undergo a puritanical regime of discipline, turned out to be the decisive playground for his talents...

...When Welles was five, the family moved to Chicago where Orson was introduced to and allegedly conversed with the musical celebrities who frequented his mother's salon and, already stage-struck, made his theater debut in the Chicago Opera as Madame Butterfly's love-child, "'trouble...

...Vengeance will be mine, runs the Old Testament epigram to Anna Karenina...

...Unlike the authors of This War Called Peace, though, Pipes believes that the Soviet system can be transformed from within, and that the West is capable of formulating a longterm strategy to hasten this transformation...

...You still have the chance to continue our tradition in such a vigorous age...

...Thousands read my books...

...The people who populate this novel avoid sunlight like any werewolf...

...They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night...

...Their newspaper of record is not the New York Times, but the tabloid New York Post, whose lurid headlines (Sex Fiends, Killer Bees, Coma Babies) are a leitmotif of the book...

...Alas, today few young people would recognize my name, let alone know my work...

...Bright Lights, Big City, which takes place in a veritable blizzard of white powder, is a superb rendering of life in the reverse fast lane in Manhattan...

...It not only has great wit and sense of place, but it is also one of the more virtuosic displays of writing by a young American since Michael Herr pasted together Dispatches...

...Characters whose main activity is receding into the furniture are just not that fascinating...

...Anna throws herself under a train, and the act is not ridiculous...

...They need the Bolivian Marching Powder...

...it may be that video ennui is setting in and Yuppies are discovering alternate means of communication...

...past episodes of family hurt are pasted in from the Freudian archives...

...The father seems unattractive enough when he arrives on the scene, but that does not alter our impatience with his hardboiled son...

...More intriguing still is the book's popularity among young professionals...

...At best, only superficial improvements are possible...

...If you enclose payment or credit card number we will extend your new subscription for one FREE month per year...

...But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy...

...essay by one of his stylistic mentors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the subject of early success...

...But McInerney's breathless tale of a young man's fast fade on the club-andcocaine circuit holds up nicely...

...I say unfortunately, because the book would be better off if he followed Henry Miller's example in Tropic of Cancer and refrained from rapping his naughty characters on the knuckles...

...He felt that the discipline would tone all of his being...

...McInerney should have respected these bounds, skipped the didactic bits, and resigned himself to There was a time when I was very well known among Catholics...

...In any event, McInerney himself has turned into a kind of media doll...

...Be that as it may, I strongly advise anyone tempted, after reading This War Called Peace, to stick his head in the oven, first to consult Professor Richard Pipes's important study, Survival Is Not Enough...

...Welles...

...Then again, it might not...

...Enter Bernstein, a Russian-born orthopedist...

...Not only has he become a household fixture at places like Vanity Fair, but Women's Wear Daily and Mademoiselle have accorded the photogenic young author the sort of treatment normally reserved for Sting or Richard Gere...

...Orson's incurable addiction to life as theater, theater as life, was without reservation encouraged...

...Larkin's message is that all this happy hedonism masks a deep despair...

...Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers...

...You know, I was like an eternal virgin...

...We pick up a good deal of interesting information about the mar tial arts, and there are pleasant narrative stretches when the author stops forcing the exiguous emotional content of the novel and simply depicts the quotidian rounds of his characters...

...and the proceedings suddenly turn very pale...

...but it would be in a novel like Mclnerney's, because there is no moral order (despite the commercials) for these characters to violate...

...Unfortunately, McInerney wishes to make the same sort of point...

...You know the moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line El BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY Jay McInerney/Vintage Books/$5.95 paper RANSOM Jay McInerney/Vintage Books/$5.95 paper George Sim Johnston 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings...

...What are we to make of all this...

...A novel which relies heavily on gags and one-liners can be a let-down the second time around...

...One can't help suspecting that the authors share this assessment and that the shrillness with which they denounce contemporary Western (and especially American) civilization derives from a private sense of despair...

...This experience was followed-or rather, accompanied-by hazards in another part of the forest...

...I now have better things to do with my time than worry about my books...

...he persuaded Hill to reform the dramatic curriculum then current at Todd so that Shakespeare would become the rule rather than the exception...

...My, what I would write today if only I could...

...Who wants to see the young hero reform, anyway...

...it is rather quite inseparable from the moral chaos the author wishes to depict...

...In 1983-84, during the START talks, the Soviet strategic arsenal had increased to nearly 8,000 warheads...

...All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder...

...I had a very bad way of turning these guys off...

...Also like Crozier and his colleagues, Pipes is often critical of the ways in which Western statesmen have responded to the Soviet menace...

...When it appeared last autumn, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City created the kind of commotion which seldom accompanies a new work of fiction anymore...

...Ransom has apparently come to Japan to escape the crass material ways of his TV producer father, but his filial complaints are nothing more than trite adolescent grumbling...

...It seems that everyone who is halfway serious about contemporary fiction has read it with relish...

...The Soviet system," they write, "cannot reform itself without the risk of collapse, since ideology remains its only source of legitimacy and justification...

...Arkadin, which he subsequently made into a film) with the complaint: "Yes, everybody had heard of him, but nobody knew much about him...

...changes to six A.M...

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...No doubt, they would fiercely deny it: If the West would only repent, if it would renounce its decadent ways and emulate the example of Solzhenitsyn, it could still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat...

...On the contrary, Moscow currently has client-states in Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East...

...He has, in fact, written a book which should be around for a while...