McHALE'S RETREAT:

...However, the pretense is rather fun: "Farragan had absolutely no intention of murdering his son," we read on the book's first page," . . . but it occasionally disturbed him that he so positively enjoyed fantasizing the killer poses...

...That means that he cusses less than they, though all McHale's characters spend a lot of time cussing, and that unlike them he doesn't say, or says only when coerced and then with uncommon embarrassment, words like jap, yid, and nigger, a sure index of nastiness in McHale's world...

...Pop hasn't been to church in thirty-five years, but it appeases something inside him to know he's got a daughter in the convent...

...Sex is not the only problem in these marriages, but it is always a big problem...

...I wish that McHale wouldn't allow Murphy to become "suddenly enthused" at something...

...The most important fact in McHale's consistent fictional world is the practical joke that God played on the protagonist when He made him a Catholic and mated him for life, maybe longer, with guilt...

...It's too bad, because even in Farragan's Retreat McHale's success is attained in spite of his prose, a very remarkable feat, and when success is partial, as in Principato, or dubious, as in Alinsky's Diamond, his prose becomes more than one can reasonably ignore...

...Beside it, Principato appears unresolved and Alinsky's Diamond anarchic and flatly anti-climactic...

...But he is, regrettably, a pretty dull fellow...

...First, although Murphy might just be up to his task if only McHale could decide what that task is, Alinsky is not nearly up to his...

...You don't have to be a Catholic, of course, to feel guilty about all things, perhaps especially the absence of anything rationally requiring feelings of guilt (witness poor Portnoy, trapped in a Jewish joke as Principato et al, are trapped in Catholic jokes— leading legions of dust-jacket-cited critics to call McHale, preposterously, a Roman Roth), but McHale seems to think it helps...

...If a dilapidated bar in Philadelphia could be equally in New York or Boston, then why not make it a cafe in Italy...

...Wasn't that something to drink from...

...What, actually, did Father want...

...For Murphy, when a child growing up in Iowa, tried to commit suicide by walking into a tornado, which turned aside, leaving him unharmed, killing his parents and sister...

...But is it really Malcolm and Edward whom Simon is being asked to pay for, or America's guilt in the war, or Anna, Jim, and Arthur's self-serving, hypocritical, middle-class complacency...

...We're only in our thirties—too young for something like that to he gone entirely...

...Murphy must suffer for wasting his life, and Alinsky must have him suffer for the terrible deed committed long ago by unknown Christians against the innocent and thus marked Jew in Aruba, Iowa...

...What McHale can do at the top of his form, as he has shown once, is make you shudder, though I don't think many readers will shudder at Alinsky's Diamond...

...Arthur's son Simon opted for peace in Canada rather than war in Vietnam, and into the bargain wrote a letter of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh...

...And, of course, one can merely, and easily, think that he has done one of these when he has in fact done another...

...This is wintry indeed, with a touch of the epi-phanic chill of Joyce's The Dead...

...Learning that Murphy had once been spared, Alinsky realizes that he cannot make him suffer so terminally as he had supposed, and as Murphy had come to expect, so the retribution is visited on others, whom, Alinsky rationalizes, he is doing a favor...

...Conversely, one of the best things about the protagonist, who, unlike his adversaries, does have some depth and ability to work toward self-knowledge, is simply that he is gentler than the nasty people in his family...

...Simon is such an essential louse, whether morality or cowardice prompted his actions, that the reader does not altogether doubt that there may be some justice in this retribution...

...In this case it means that cannibal sexual appetite you had when I married you...

...Here, we are to believe in Alinsky for himself, as something more than a phase of Murphy's dysfunction, and yet he too is a caricature...

...Like Farragan's Retreat, Alinsky's Diamond would be about the mysterious and sudden coalescence of random or disjointed circumstances into the supreme fact of terror, of paralyzing, existential fear, of Frost's loneliness that "Will be more lonely ere it will be less...

...Most of the people, the supporting cast, turn out to be the way they seem initially, also malignant in the extreme, and their incapacity for change reflects the shallowness of their conception...

...Were even Catherine Barkley and Lieutenant Henry that bad together...

...McHale's heroes all have rotten marriages—as, given their wives, who could not?—an irreducible circumstance from which each novel's plot develops...

...or one can pretend to give it away and yet still retain a considerable interest in it...

...And I most certainly wish there were no dialogue of this sort (between Murphy and his wife Mo-nique): "Bring back the Holy Grail for me, Frank...

...It is not until the novel's last chapter that the moral consequences of delight in fantasizing the role of Abraham are clear...

...The worst of these characters are the hero's relatives—his mother, siblings, in-laws, and especially wife and children—and the worst thing about them is that they have to be related to the pleasant protagonist...

...If an American Irish Catholic can assume the identity of the Italian Principato, then why not let him be an American expatriate drinking himself to death in the French provinces...

...At its center is a single man —Angelo Principato, Arthur Farragan, and now Francis Xavier Murphy—who can be young or middle-aged, failed or successful, impoverished or comfortable, but who will be pleasant, passive, and reasonably humble, manipulated by, uncomprehending of, and finally, subtly, rebellious against the events and people about him...

...The events strike the reader as very funny when they happen (to the tune of at least two belly laughs per chapter), but they turn out to be either slightly sinister or malignant in the extreme...

...Arthur Farragan, appointed by Anna and Jim as trigger man to get Simon, dies because he is willing to murder his own son...

...Which should claim him, leaving the other to saddle him with its guilt...

...He is scarcely alive, and his inclination toward violence, if believable at all, is wholly pathological, divorced from any larger meaning of the book...

...How does one describe it...

...Then, after Alinsky meets his own Nemesis — whose identity is a particularly failed bit of irony—it develops that nothing has been as it appeared, and the indiscriminate slaughter of a number of the book's personages was a mistake or at least an act with no possibly redemptive value...

...It doesn't work, though, or at least it didn't for me...

...or one can refuse to take it from someone else and end up having all the more of it...

...the stage business McHale gives him—drinking countless cans of Bud-weiser beer, boasting about his possessions and his unlikely service for Israel in the Six Day War—seems to go on forever, does not stay funny very long, and has no perceptible metaphoric value...

...Should he remain the good Catholic boy he has always been, or should he assume the old man's Defiance of the Church...

...Edmund Farragan, protagonist Arthur's brother in McHale's second novel, is a priest on whom his family tries to load their own moral responsibility, but there is too much of it, and too much guilt, to sit comfortably even on Edmund's broad shoulders...

...I don't want this novelist to go back to Philadelphia, but I hope he will follow his third novel with a book worthy of his second...

...The story is, naturally, all about guilt and atonement...

...McHALE'S RETREAT Mark Taylor In Alinsky's Diamond Tom McHale spatially extends the world of his earlier fiction, the two novels Princi-pato and Farragan's Retreat, but he does not really alter k or its laws...

...Still, McHale is a serious, purposeful writer, and he clearly had big ideas for Alinsky's Diamond...

...And why...

...Thus, there will be in every book not only celibate priests and gluttonous gigolos, as well as occasional homosexuals and practitioners of deliciously odd perversions, but the man who is or seems to be totally impotent...

...He is guilty of not holding onto life...

...Farragan must die because, as his ambiguous attitude toward Simon comes largely to reveal, he did not find it enough to live, in himself or in his son...

...They are not, as they absolutely are in Farragan's Retreat, a cruelly definitive interpretation of everything that has gone before...

...Anyway, Simon does not pay, does not die, but Arthur Farragan does...

...Long before his time is due, as his friend Fitzpatrick charges, Farragan starts "going back: acceding to the inner dyings and crumblings, embracing the lush grayness of senility...

...At worst, which it is much of the time, hackneyed, flaccid, and dreary...

...Maybe, like John Steinbeck in East of Eden, he is trying too hard...

...Objectively horrible things happen in Alinsky's Diamond, plenty of them, but they are arbitrary and gratuitous...

...their Christ-likeness, however, never presumes to be pure but is interestingly mixed with something else: Farragan's with the obedience of Abraham, Murphy's with the ambiguous luck of, oddly, Barabbas...

...Anticipated by Mermelstein in Principato and Binky Applebaum in Farragan's Retreat as the wayward Christian's Jewish conscience, Alinsky is not altogether a new character in McHale's work though he is certainly meant to be the most fully drawn of his type...

...When someone says something in earnest, he says it in dead earnest...

...At best, perhaps serviceable, capable of conveying information, though with none of the richness, inventiveness, and complexity that McHale can give to incidents (part of the trouble may be that the incidents come too easily, that McHale's imagination is so prodigal that he finds no need to temper its products...

...Neither is sexual potency or lack thereof the hero's full definition, but it is a substantial part of it...

...This terror at the heart of Farragan's Retreat is McHale's one signal fictional achievement...

...After all, what other religion than Christianity has come up with a premise like original sin—to dirty mankind before it had a chance to dirty itself...

...This bit of fortune doesn't interest Murphy much, but it proves of surpassing importance to Meyer Alin-sky, a cosmopolitan Jew with a Byron-ically dark past, which began, also, in Iowa, who enlists Murphy, along with a whore, a pimp, an abortionist, and a senile priest, in the Fourteenth Crusade: a trek from France to the Holy Land with Murphy carrying the cross in which is hidden Alinsky's stolen diamond...

...In Principato life goes along untidily but tolerably for quite a while...

...But Murphy, be it said, is suitably impressed, and sets off to do, a la Proust, a biography of Alinsky...

...Not even Arthur's bitch-wife Muriel (who is far more legitimately hateful than Murphy's Mo-nique), the most unredeemably damned of all...

...Except that he is not really willing, of course, but pretends to go along with the plan the better to sabotage it...

...when they are, all the incidents of the book—apparently random, diffuse, trivial, comical (Farragan is the kind of Catholic, for instance, who has no problem visiting whores and keeping a mistress, but who must drape cloth over statues of the Virgin Mary before making love to his wife) — become relevant, compressed into a climax that is a moment of overawing human terror...

...When Malcolm, the son of Arthur's sister Anna, is killed in Vietnam, and Edward, the son of Arthur's other brother Jim, is maimed there, the family decides that Simon must pay for it with his life...

...I wish, also, that I could be confident McHale didn't mean "amused" when he writes "bemused...

...The several reviewers who faulted the new book for sketchy or unbelievable European and Middle Eastern locales, instead of the familiar Philadelphia (where on the whole they would rather have McHale be) surely cannot remember of the earlier books very well, and they make McHale out to be much more a local colorist than he is or tries to be...

...Guilt is the real antagonist in these books, the enemy within the pleasant hero's sullied skin...

...or one can give it away and no longer have it...

...Now there is something very wrong with all this...

...or one can begin without it and then generously take it over from someone else...

...In Alinsky's Diamond one can never really understand why the characters should get what they get, and the dozens of often comic episodes do not, finally, revolve about a single moral hub...

...And guilt is a particularly malleable, hence novelistically adaptable commodity since it admits of so many forms of distribution, among which are these: one can have guilt and keep it...

...His strengths, like his weaknesses, are elsewhere...

...In their humility, which is not always quite so authentic as it seems, McHale's heroes are all Christ figures, of a sort...

...Elsewhere McHale can'get away with caricatures because they do serve, somehow, to define the problems and environment of the protagonist, but he does not allow them equal time...

...And so do his objective spokesmen like Captain Kemal Erim, a Moslem inspector for Interpol in Alinsky's Diamond, who indicts Murphy for carrying not only the normal human burden of mortality but also "the extra burden . . . Christianity's Manichaean legacy of all-pervasive sin and evil and its accompanying notion of guilt...

...In fact, the dimensions of McHale's world, which depend hardly at all on physical environment, are remarkably constant...

...It occurs to me that certainly Christianity could not endure without a briar patch like guilt, nor the briar patch of guilt without a curious religion like Christianity to tend it...

...Principato's own relationship to his old man's protracted absence from church is rather more complex because his loyalties to parent and institution, both potential sources of salvation and damnation, are divided...

...So the man who is to die is one with the man who is spared, and because of that coincidence he cannot die at all...

...Another way of saying this is that in Farragan's Retreat nobody gets away with anything, not Jim with his absolute categories of patriot and traitor nor Arthur with his of virgin and whore nor the young man El Greco who looks to Catholicism for moral superiority...

...Except, perhaps, for Lucy, who says, "You've all gone and loaded a kind of moral responsibility on me...

...Cornelius, the castrato Luciano, Binky Applebaum, and opposite him the libidinous superman, Principato's brother Rocco, the pimp Jonathan Whitmore, Binky Applebaum again, the unexpected vision of whose intimidating, dazzling tume-scence by the hero affords a major if unsettling recognition in each book...

...when someone is awakened, he is rudely awakened...

...Although Principato, Farragan, and Murphy differ considerably from each other in this regard, each man is surrounded by other men who represent collectively a full range of sexual possibilities...

...The difficulty of answering this question is implied by the general uncertainty, shared by Principato and forty-one attendant priests, whether at the moment of his death the old man was returning to the Church...

...it is only when Principato's sister Lucy, a. k. a. Sister Veronica, decides to leave her order that life, remaining untidy, becomes for all concerned intolerable...