Low Tide / One for the Money
Eberstadt, Fernanda & Belsky, Dick
smoke. Toward the end of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta the narrator has the effrontery to speak of his "invented classmate," so that even that justification for the narrator's compulsive...
...The obvious starting point for Low Tide is Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms...
...Operating from the hallowed premise that fledgling novelists should write about what they know, Mr...
...Years ago I brashly panned Morning Noon and Night by the late (great) James Gould Cozzens for its self-destructive attitude toward reality, which, it seemed to me, had devastating potential for the novel form...
...Yet we do picket missile sites, ministries, and embassies, demanding an end to war...
...its conventions are too critical to be cavalierly flouted...
...But one will want to see some-thing more sharp and personal in his second novel...
...Belsky has made his hero a reporter for the New York Blade, a newspaper which emphasizes screaming headlines and detailed coverage of bloody metro murders...
...Fortunately, not all of Low Tide is overwritten...
...But they are as hard to hide as they are impossible to avoid...
...482 pages...
...Lish...
...Belsky knows more about his mouthpiece than he is telling...
...which is, in my opinion, their calamitous strategic error...
...Not least, foreign policy requires much lying: since the doings are unacceptable they must be disguised...
...There was some talk of his becoming a writer, a calling consonant with doing nothing and carrying about unread books...
...paper, $14.95 cloth, $34.95 Available at bookstores 177 Post Street, Dept...
...conjure up an incredibly claustrophobic atmosphere in a minimum of space...
...This cutting of the ground beneath fiction's feet has become a contemporary fetish...
...One would like to see Fernanda Eberstadt direct her attention to a less exotic subject matter next time around...
...Yet, like death, war can only be postponed...
...On principle, because I am devoted to the popular art form that the novel will cease to be if this arrogance continues...
...Disgust twists his face . . . "But why...
...However, although recorded history has not avoided it, war is believed to be avoidable...
...John Fowles plays similar tedious hob with reality and its mirrors in A Maggot...
...Fowles played engrossingly with layers of reality, so that what at first seemed to be turned out not to have been, or not to have been as it at first seemed...
...Anthony Burgess has succumbed terribly to this vice in his recent novels, the worst I've read being The End of the World News...
...Miss Eberstadt alternates between ornate tropes and homely, aphoristic observations which suggest a cold eye and a keen sense of humor...
...There is nothing we can do about it...
...Those who have advanced orthodox conservative or liberal views of the family will be both challenged and fascinated...
...86 Maple Ave...
...Belsky's sense of place may be good, but there is no character to his New York, none of the sour, angry, corrupt flavor of Hammett's San Francisco or Chandler's Los Angeles...
...Rostow/University of Texas Press/$30 SECRETS OF STATE Barry Rubin/Oxford University Press/$25 NATION AGAINST NATION Thomas M. Franck/Oxford University Press/$19.95 Ernest van den Haag As Congressman George Hansen reminds us...
...We do not picket hospitals or funeral parlors demanding an end to death...
...Tb accentuate his marginality, his being a man full of contradictions...
...which is what so many technically brilliant serious contemporary novelists are doing...
...both are written in a fragrant, adjective-laden species of prose in which everything is described from at least three or four different angles...
...we learn that - only the IRS can attach 100 percent of a tax debtor's wages and or property only the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without court process of any kind ^ only the IRS can seize property without a court order ^ only the IRS can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS only the IRS can legally, without a court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance We also learn of recent armed searches conducted by IRS agents, of "hit lists" of snooping, of harassment, entrapment and a myriad of other horrors that are actually happening in our republic...
...I demur, however...
...What is missing from One for the Money is the idiosyncratic point of view that mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler brought to their work...
...But Low Tide, flaws and all, is still a first novel of obvious promise by a literary critic who is already far past the "promising" stage...
...As Thomas Hobbes pointed out, there would be a bellum omnium contra omnes...
...One may oppose, or deplore, or lament, or rage at the given reality in which we human beings travail, whose ultimate truths forever recede from us, tantalizing us, mocking us...
...Wanniski's guide is great fun and his insights into the fourth estate make the MediaGuide a hard book to put down...
...1, San Francisco, CA 94108 — PACIFIC INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH IRS EXPOSED THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 43...
...Six pages later, Jem blows his brains out with a Luger...
...they must participate in rebellions and civil wars, even if neither side is savory, let alone democratic...
...The ends are unclear, sometimes even to the protagonists, and the means often are foreign to the democratic ethos...
...The major difference is that while Capote was fully in control of his material at 24, Miss Eberstadt is not quite there yet at 25...
...The narrative, even at its most fantastic, carries the reader forward persuasively...
...It participates in the super-natural magic...
...Thus there are many occasions for moral indignation by the noisy minority which prefers morality to foreign policy...
...Most people, however, are mainly concerned with sex and taxes—until war, the ultimate foreign policy, threatens to involve everybody...
...tainable one...
...And for all the verbal extravagance of Low Tide, the character of Jezebel comes through in a vivid and touching way...
...I've pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends...
...This unique book analyzes the many major family issues, including the viability and role of mediating structures, the consequences of social welfare programs, and such problems as domestic violence, children's rights and parental authority, divorce, and teenage pregnancy...
...We refuse to realize that foreign policies and appropriate defense preparations may postpone particular wars, but cannot avoid war, any more than physicians can avoid death...
...I enjoyed John Fowles's The French Lieu-tenant's Woman until his double ending...
...Which is why we have governments and laws and, not least, courts which have the authority and power to impose their decisions on individuals...
...It comes as a bit of a shock to discover midway through this decidedly hermetic novel that Jem has ghostwritLOW TIDE Fernanda Eberstadt/Alfred A. Knopf/$13.95 ONE FOR THE MONEY Dick Belsky/Academy Chicago Publishers/$14.95 Terry Teachout 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 ten a very conservative position paper for his father on the problem of inter-national terrorism...
...I've changed dates, places, characters, I've created complications, added and taken away thousands of things...
...Democracies must associate with repulsive dictators to prevail over equally repulsive others...
...Belsky handles the self-imposed conventions of this particular genre with great assurance, and One for the Money makes for a very pleasant read...
...War itself is not the Ernest van den Haag is the John M Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...
...You can't trust the narrator, who may or may not "ambitious and non-ideological...the Guide's loudest bang will be that of the exploding egos of the 300 journalists who are rated from poor to the best...
...And Lucy Shannon is more a deft sketch for a first-rate series character than a fully finished creation like Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer...
...We don't quite face it but we are resigned to death...
...Jezebel thereupon abandons his corpse and leaves Mexico "with all the world before me and a whole lot of debts to be paid...
...one is never quite sure if Mr...
...II) Michael McClintock/Zed Books, Ltd./$30.95 (set...
...The central character's acedia in that novel, it seemed to me, dangerously surrenders the novelist's role as an interpreter of reality through the syncretizing and (with luck) epiphanous fires of the creative imagination...
...I wanted to drink in her keen jeweled eyes, the slouchy, inhospitable projections of her figure: pelvis thrust forward, head back...
...it is ineluctable in the end...
...Jezebel Western, the narrator of Low Tide, lives on New York's Upper East Side in a "dark intoxicating grave of a house" with her crazy mother and a wise black cook named Eustacius...
...both are "about" adolescent sexuality...
...Because when existence and us poor pitiable human beings who are trapped in it are treated as a reductioad absurdum, with a kind of gallows humor in which the bitterness and resentment drive out compassion, then the reader is alienated...
...The Washington Times "Mr...
...The dialogue is crisp, the plot efficient, In democratic societies foreign policy puzzles most people...
...She sat so upright in a sheet of purple on the edge of a black vinyl chair, stroking my leg and transfixing me with that slurred growl, issuing from a wet, slightly tremulous pout...
...Lawrence Durrell succeeded with this technique wonderfully in his "Quartet," the four romances set in Alexandria...
...That, it seemed to me, was a development from earlier reversals of circumstance and character in his The Magus with less virtue than vice: He could not decide which ending to settle on, so he pushed that chore off on the reader, which is sweet and kind, but which is also abandoning the writer's job...
...Why...
...Their power is independent of any laws they don't make or approve...
...Mayta, whom he finally interviews in person: Naturally your real name never appears even once...
...She falls in love with Jem Chasm, a rich young Oxonian of bizarre appearance...
...least source of universal puzzlement and indignation: Why war when every-body is for peace...
...Gunter Grass of Dog's Years is a shade of the author of The Tin Drum...
...Sokolov declares the technique "spellbindingly successful," which in that novel's case it may be...
...4n et tremely perceptive and salutary study...
...I) and GUATEMALA (v...
...Jezebel and Jem finally go to bed together on page 164...
...Of course . . . everyone will think it's pure fantasy...
...Isn't there something we can do...
...But there is a fatal step beyond Joyce that the writer dare not take for fear of the abyss...
...They have supreme authority and power over their territory and are in-dependent, both of the authority of other states and of any superior authority...
...We are duly grateful to the physicians who help us overcome our various crises and postpone death...
...I read in the Wall Street Journal Raymond Sokolov complain about Gordon Lish's Peru (Lish is a literary guru), "[He] plays a very fancy game indeed...
...Toward the end of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta the narrator has the effrontery to speak of his "invented classmate," so that even that justification for the narrator's compulsive investigations into the career of his historically petty and not greatly interesting central character is given the lie...
...To Horse Our People, a RAPS per copy (add SI for posrage & handling) for which I an, enclosing my check for $ I Name I Address City State Zip AS - I WAR AND PEACE: FOREIGN POLICY IN BRIEF ON TRIAL: REAGAN'S WAR AGAINST NICARAGUA Edited by Marlene Dixon/Zed Books, Ltd./$9.95 THE AMERICAN CONNECTION: STATE TERROR AND POPULAR RESISTANCE IN EL SALVADOR (v...
...the sense of place strong...
...But when its author is human, subject to the ontological paradox, that act can never be ex.nihilo, a process that first repudiates not only the existence of an objective reality but the possibility of there being an ascerFernanda Eberstadt, a young woman from New York who contributes shrewd and intelligent literary criticism to Commentary, has written a novel called Low Tide...
...Also to show the prejudices that exist with regard to his subject among those who supposedly want to liberate society from its defects...
...Marquez has not been able to build on...
...He tells the real...
...Dick Belsky, city editor of the New York Post, makes his debut as a novelist with an engaging murder mystery in the hard-boiled vein called One for the Money...
...Cozzens's narrator doubted the significance of anything that had ever happened to him equally as he doubted the material veracity of his, or anybody's, memory of everything...
...He raises his head as if he's been stung by a wasp...
...6 /&-,`s $12.95 Vim` 11 plus $1.50 postage and handling represent the real Mr...
...i Book Division I PO Box 1682 I Bellevue...
...Morristown, NJ 07960 .,.t 7~ (201) 267-2515 •v...
...At the end, Mr...
...both Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...After all, each war, however much imposed on individuals, could be avoided by the society that fights it...
...The narrator keeps returning to the same moments and events, squeezing his memory for detail...
...Novelists are not the gods they seem to be taking themselves for...
...Since Miss Eberstadt's periodical affiliations imply a political center of gravity appreciably right of center, one approaches her first novel with considerable interest...
...Journal of Commerce 1986 MediaGuide Jude Wanniski's Critical Review of the Print Media • A survey and evaluation of the major political economic press • Ratings of the leading political, foreign, financial reporters and columnists • A critical look at the big news events of 1985 AVAILABLE FROM 'N POLVCONOMICS, INC...
...an old maxim states that "the power to tax is the power to destroy" In this chilling expose of the IRS...
...Why war when nobody wants it...
...The technique is obsessive...
...WA 98009 I Please send me copes of Congressman George Hansen's book...
...It's as if everybody has one book, and one only, of the marvelous insouciance of Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in him, which was a triumph that Sr...
...Well, I don't really know exactly why he is...
...Her slender donnee is smothered at times by mannered characterization and extravagant language: We sat in the conservatory drinking tea and rum in the late afternoon...
...An important work!» —ROBERT NISBET Columbia University THE AMERICAN FAMILY AND THE STATE Edited by JOSEPH R. PEDEN and FRED R. GLAHE Foreword by ROBERT NISBET A distinguished group of scholars takes a comprehensive look at the modern family and how its increasingly serious problems relate to the intrusions of government...
...12.25 paper THE MOOD/INTEREST THEORY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY Jack E. Holmes/University Press of Kentucky/$24 EISENHOWER, KENNEDY AND FOREIGN POLICY W.W...
...one can as a writer and artist confabulate a counter creation, out of our human despair...
...In Magus, Mr...
...Both books were writ-ten by very young authors...
...Their problematic courtship, in the course of which they shuttle between comfy watering holes on either side of the Atlantic, culminates in a frenzied, surrealistic trip through Mexico...
...If individuals were as autonomous, as independent of superiGeorge Hansen has been one of the most outspoken members of the U.S...
...Lucy Shannon, the wisecracking "detective" of One for the Money, is portrayed in admirably straightforward fashion...
...But in Timc and Nunc, Mr...
...The world is run by differentsocieties organized into separate states...
...Finally, just before the inconclusive end: "The character in my novel is queer," I tell [Mayta] after a bit...
...This is the sort of novel where the characters take the subway and get off at the right stops...
...he finally asks...
...The creative imagination is a paradigm of divine creativity...
...they must support violence and deceit for the sake of defense or peace...
...What sort of fiction is a 25-year-old conservative likely to write...
...Nothing of the sort exists to settle the conflicts among states or to restrain TMetrii Mail Marketing, inc...
...Durrell's method had become a capricious, meretricious, and ill-concealed device for pumping in a kind of gallimaufric suspense and specious profundity...
...House of Representatives and a long-time enemy of the IRS or power and law, they would fight out their conflicts...
...The novel is too serious a thing to be cavalier about...
...And we learn that there are things we can do to fight the IRS...
...I deplored Walker Percy's The Second Coming for cognate sufficient reasons...
...it is truly potestas legibus absoluta...
...Justly...
...Miss Eberstadt's answer to this intriguing question is something of a surprise: Low Tide turns out to be a symbolic novella about the emotional and sexual rites of passage of a pair of wealthy adolescents...
...there is no unwelcome hint of tour de force in Mr...
...An Asiatic monkey with Ivory Soap skin, and hair crimped in a chestnut wave...
...Belsky's use of a woman as first-person narrator...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
