BOOKS

...Characters often appear so changeable in these works, or rather we're required to react to them as being so variously usable because conclusions-of actions and/or of pop moral lessons-compel certain behaviors at certain times, whether or not these jibe completely with what we've come to know of the characters...

...The essay, "The Problem of God Today," is a good introduction both to "the problem" and to Macquarrie's approach to it Here at least he broadly outlines an argument validating and grounding our God-talk: the existence of the world, of moral consciousness, of our quest for meaning, and so forth...

...Why not accept Slammer as entertaining pulp and its characters as pulp stereotypes...

...But I have to doubt it...

...The characters in this kind of work exist as grotesques, each an exaggerated figure who's never allowed, through the anomalies of his quirks' and everyday events, to assume real dimensions, to lend actions the credibility of his felt inclinations, to earn sympathy or distaste...

...In light of my meager knowledge of penal life and literature, I can't [absolutely vouch for the authority of Goldfarb's view...

...Goldfarb's complaints vary from his indictment of inequities in the bail system, a subject he's dealt with at length before (Ransom: A Critique of the American Bail System), to his broader attack on jails as "negative institution(s...

...But to complicate matters, the jail also has come to be used both as a short-term correctional institution for misdemeanants, and a way station for a random melange of other defendants...

...The first is non-fiction, the second a novel...

...Whatever we've seen of the characters' private lives- and Greer's narrative shifts do give us the internal glimpses, however gratui-tous at times, of several of them-is rendered trivial after all, literary window-dressing...

...No doubt a hearty minority of our people would share in the criticism offered by that statement, insofar as it applies to schools-after all the gist of the last few decades' best works on education suggests that schools should adjust radically to their clients' needs...

...and lets the complexities of prison life, once so graphically described, fade from the seem...

...and to discount its characters as stereotypes is to do this sort of work a favor...

...He is decidedly existentialist in philosophical orientation, but open to, and indeed sympathetic with, other points of view...

...From' the start Ronald Goldfarb distinguishes that "(a) prison houses convicted criminals...

...and he specifies misuses of jails that he sees as stemming from the Jacksonian era, when "institutionalization became die 'preferred solution to the problems of poverty, crime, delinquency and insanity.'" Chapter by detailed chapter Goldfarb meticulously reveals how jails in our day consequently run according to biases against the sick, narcotics addicts, alcoholics, and juve-nies-especially against the poor in all these categories...

...And his evaluation of current trends in the field of religious studies is always sober and realistic...

...Macquarrie's earlier Principles of Christian Theology (1966), although not without fault, remains perhaps the best one-volume systematic exposition of the Christian faith, still a practical text for seminary, university, and college courses...

...Instead, each time Goldfarb achieved another discovery about jails, it became clearer that the nature of fais argument required a categorical amassing of facts, all of them...

...Each of ths chapters originated for the most part as lectures, and several of the pieces appeared earlier in theological journals...

...God only knows what Williams will tell them, but in the case of the others, whose praise is more effusive and direct, I can't for the life of me understand what cause Greer has given them for celebration...

...The facts are so overwhelming, the proofs so extended, that at times they almost become boring...

...I came to feel that only die cumulative power of his data could allow him his quixotic role, ratify it, and convince us of its sanity...

...He has never been sidetracked by a passing fad...

...That's the closest I've come to the wrong side of the walls...

...BOORS: THE WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL JOHN DRUSKA Jails RONALD GOLDFARB Anchor Press/Doubleday, $9.95 Slammer BEN GREER Atheneum, $8.95 Let me confess to possessing no more than minimal credentials for judging the veracity of any work, fiction or non, that purports to deal with penal institutions...

...But only in rare instances did the book actually drag under the weight of its language, seem to circle back and repeat itself needlessly, or lapse into the kind of minor redundancy apparent in the quote on Jails as pretrial detention centers cited above...

...Unfortunately, this is not the sort of collection I would readily recommend to anyone who already has some familiarity with Macquarrie's work...

...for it says in effect that if he only understood himself as well as the Christian understands him, he would see that after all he is really a believer...

...Darcy, the grisly ice-pick wielding enforcer, Angel of Death to his brother convicts...

...Jails, Goldfarb believes, ought to become, or be replaced by, positive institutions that will "channel people away from troubled punitive conditions into treatment-oriented corrective programs...

...To my misfortune now, however, I remember nothing of it...

...Given such a contentious cast, the novel's made to reek with the sense of doom gathering about the Southern prison these actors inhabit...

...like so many other aspiring bestsellers, .nopular films, and TV shows, toys with our sympathies as they are directed toward people...

...Furthermore, some of the topics treated have by now a dated flavor: specifically, the references to the defunct death-of-God movement Elsewhere, timely subjects are addressed, but always in compressed and abbreviated fashion: mystery and truth, the meaning of "the Gospel," the problem of natural theology, creation and environment Those heretofore unfamiliar with the large and rich corpus of Macquarrie's writings should profit from several of the essays...

...Slammer attests to its own hypocrisy: it doesn't care a turd for the prison conditions Greer portrays or the people who create them...

...Perhaps that's because we're so seldom allowed in these works to perceive characters as they are, inner and outer...

...Lastly, I've taught in a couple of Jesuit high schools...

...But the problem here, as in any other pulp novel (Jaws, for example), grows from the way the characters are, first, assembled, then manipulated simply for the boffo effect of the actions contrived for them to perform...

...On the other hand, he is critical of those who insist there are no atheists, only people who think they're atheists...

...The fact is that Hegel is already the .dominant philosophical figure in much contemporary theology and many people, even professional theologians, don't seem to realize it...

...old westerns, horror stories, etc...

...A jail is essentially a pretrial detention center used to hold people until they are tried...

...Another age of silver-screen mutants might regard it as cause for his beatification...

...We are left instead with thematic statements without specific support: "Christians have assented to this given because of an inward testimony arising out of that self-knowledge which is part of our personal existence and which sees Christ as the fulfillment of man's inner testimony...

...I even went to the Jail a day after one of its venerable walls collapsed of its own accord, and tried to film the historic ruin...

...Here, in Indianapolis, a high-ranking cop publicly wonders whether the (Continued on page 28) police need to assume the one-time "educator's" role of using corporal punishment to discipline juveniles...

...I'm thinking of a recent Streets of San Francisco episode in which an unemployed mad professor kidnaps former students and chains them to desks in an abandoned school...

...Secondly, while home sick from grammar school, I was sent via messenger a tome on the history of Sing-Sing, as some librarian's joke in response to my request for a good book...

...I began to wonder every so often, while reading Jails, whether a pared-down, stylized argument, supported by minimal but convincing evidence, might not work better for Goldfarb, perhaps even reach a popular audience...

...the erstwhile Black redeemer Moultrie and bis foe the junkie Muslim...

...I have grown up, and lived for the majority of my life to date, just three blocks from Cook County Jail, close enough to have heard the warning siren and seen police officers, bearing high-powered rifles, patrolling our alleys for fresh escapees...

...How many readers of die Indianapolis News, or your news, will stop to question the legality of the cop's fantasy or to distinguish, amid the anti-crime railing, between prisons and jails, and appreciate the special problems of the latter...

...Goldfarb's premise is so simple and apparently truthful-the clients of jails aren't in most cases, criminals, and in other cases aren't confirmed criminals -that it's surely beyond the understanding of most Americans, caught as they are in their pulp rhetoric of self-justification, law-and-order, and so on...

...The essays are schematic, as individual lectures necessarily have to be...

...There are also seven chapters which discuss some representative-and not-so-representative-religious thinkers: Schleier-macher, Heidegger, and Bultmann are in the former category, to be sure...

...Could another work, as well documented, dispute his findings...

...and Jails is a superb compendium of research into "the ultimate ghetto of the criminal justice system" that yields an argument humane enough to virtually assure its rejection by the American public...

...At the worst, then, we might discern bars of guilt and blind prejudice that reveal us to be as much imprisoned by our inhumanity as Goldfarb's Jails contends...

...As is so often the case in TV shows of this type or in outlandish films like Free-bie and the Bean, we're asked to suspend the subtleties of moral judgment for the sake of events that come off like formulaic salvos of law-and-order rhetoric...

...Perhaps...

...their lives have been played out as a media event, its circumstances im-posed by a very insistent director...

...Thus, although he acknowledges again and again that God-language has to establish its warrants and criteria- its truth-claims, in other words- Thinking About God never supplies these for the reader...

...But how much of the modern audience has limited itself to pulp, accepts pulp as its version of reality, and uses the gross simplicities of pulp morality to codify its own experience...

...Since Slammer asks us to respond to these characters as more than common signals, at least as being fraught with special symbolic intent, we need to see through this deception, to accuse Greer of a basic misuse of character, rather than allowing him a backslide into stereotype, t That modern audience of pulp, dulled beyond such distinctions, is likely to find Slammer entertaining, maybe even important...

...In the end all that matters in this novel is the cliche of action winding up to a climax, the inevitable sorting out of fates...

...We're expected to side with these hoked-up heroics (how I'd like to see Breen as the fool cleric in War of the Worldsl) and rejoice in his subsequent mellowing, while Greer ties up a few loose ends (dispensing with characters, etc...

...It pretends to deal with modern problems, invites us to some revelation about them...

...An impromptu guard, posed with one foot up on a wooden chair set amid the rubble, activated himself long enough to shoo me away on this occasion...

...Oct 8, 1975), reports on a women's crime-fighting corps dedicated to "keeping tabs on judges and courts to assure that as few as possible criminals are set loose to maim, rape, slay and rob...

...Very soon, I should hope, we shall all be reading Hegel more assiduously than we consumed some of his less gifted interpreters and adapters...

...The comments range all the way down to Miller Williams' "one of those rare novels I'm going to tell my friends about...

...Even the Library of Congress catalogue card for Jails lists its contents as: "1.Prisons- United States . . .") Anyone who reads Goldfarb's book carefully must do so...

...The faults of Slammer and the virtues of Jails, though, have so much less to do with their subjects than they do with the literary approach each of their authors takes to his subject, that I don't feel at all presumptuous in rendering the following verdict: Slammer is a broad-stroke Hollywood-bound-type failure of a novel...

...the neophyte cellblock queen so aptly named Childs...

...This latest of John Macquarrie's books may not rank with the best of his earlier efforts, but a touch of high quality marks it nonetheless...

...But how many will go as far as Goldfarb does, and argue that jails (a term loaded with the bad connotations of bicentennial frontier rhetoric) ought to adjust to their clients as well...

...Thinking About God, however, is not one of his stronger works...

...How unfortunate that under the mass-media-mesmerized public gaze a Goldfarb is likely to regarded as a bleeding heart, and a Greer as a tough realist...

...Jails elicited from me a sympathy with the material and the ordering, and so the conclusions, of Goldfarb's probe...

...Its effects are earned as Slammer's are not...

...and the business editor of the News, under the headline "Is Prison Solution to Crime...

...each one made it matter less that Goldfarb isn't a master of prose style...

...Perhaps the most significant statement in this entire book is one that its- author seems to make offhandedly: "We have to reckon with the possibility: that after a long interval, the influence of Hegel may be coming back in theology...

...Would that be too harsh a verdict for us to sustain in this anniversary year of our release into freedom...

...Thinking About Gad JOHN MacQUARRIE Harper & Row, $8.95 RICHARD P. McBRIEN John Macquarrie, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, writes clearly and with intellectual balance, controlling all the while an impressively wide range of literature...

...Add to their generic differences this more crucial one: Jails is a flesh-and-blood work, Slammer is all flash and bluster...

...The sheer weight of the facts he assembles compels us to share in his passion for jail reform...

...I can think of only three reasons that might allow me to comment on another's view of prisons or jails...

...No thesis is pursued to its conclusion...

...Slammer, for the most part, shows us its inadequacies...

...it's a riot, complete with mutilations, hostages, police sniping, and a comeback appearance by the once-fazed Breen that matches up to any prison padre's eleventh-hour conquest ever captured on grade-B celluloid...

...Ami he is quick to remind us that "we live in an ambiguous world where bo final proof, one way or the other, is available...

...And each discovery made me anticipate further documentation toward yet another discovery...

...I've no doubt that characters at least similar to these exist in prison society, even as they do in our extra-mural world...

...simply isn't entertaining because, I think, it aspires to be more than pulp...

...but each in its own way ought to engage its audience in an experience that it makes credible, and through that experience in an act of what some might call revelation...

...Here's good old James Dickey leading the pack of Greer's admirers with such bombast as: "diamond-bard breath-taking focus...

...Maybe it's all okay as pulp, as escape...

...Least of all those frequent Hemingwayesque flourishes that underscore his posing: "But guns were for killing and he was not, and it bothered him that the stock felt good.in his hands...

...Hegelianism is particularly strong in Karl Rahner and Hans Kiing, and, on the Protestant side, in Moltmann and Pannenberg...

...I go so far as to count some of their prisoners among my friends...

...After the lots have been cast, we've learned nothing of these men...

...Slammer's strutting and fretting is so transparent, it's no wonder the book and its author have been propped up by what's come to be the usual mere-ticious array of jacket blurbs...

...After his convenient death the show's detective-heroes eulogize the man, making him out to be a victim of the changes in modern education...

...Cataclysm comes on schedule, as per formula and finger-wagging foreshadowing...

...Perhaps, then, distinctions like that between, the "sport" and the "bum," the rich drunk who's winked at and the poor one who's arrested, will cease creating easy outs for a society of self-righteous jailers which needs a dumping ground for its misfits, no questions asked...

...It's using them as ornament, part of our modern violence-deco...

...There is little here, as far as I can determine, which one could not find more fully developed in one of several other Macquarrie volumes-and he has written some substantial books indeed...

...Jails forced me to trust Goldfarb's methods, and to assent to sharing his convictions...

...Surely it's because pulp melodrama makes unconscionable demands on its characters and its audience...

...There is some internal coherence nonetheless, because each of the essays has to do, in one way or another, with the problem of God: method, language, criteria for truth, grounds for belief, the relation of God with the world, and so forth...

...Roman Catholics and not a few Missouri Synod Lutherans might usefully ponder his straightforward piece on heresy, for example...

...Goldfarb documents conditions at jails that are worse, he claims, than those in most prisons...

...How wonderfully the sinful, narrow-minded Breen ascends to Ms heroism...

...Jails, on the other hand, is not only not about prisons, but it's an honorable book...

...I read the work avidly, to defy her at first, out of fascination soon after...

...Such a view ("anonymous Christianity" and all that) "infringes the integrity of the man who professes himself an atheist, and does not permit genuine dialogue with him...

...the author himself, Ben Greer (a "born writer" who "became a prison guard to write this novel"), posing as the rookie guard Walsh...

...Slammer, like so much else of our modern pulp (as vs...

...Each of these essays provides the reader with a generous taste of a particular issue or problem, but it is rarely more than a taste...

...Macquarrie always indicates the direction of his own thought, but he never takes us all the way down the road to its end...

...The crux of Goldfarb's argument against jails as they now exist is his contention that "All total institutions -particularly penal institutions and most particularly jails-may be said to be run for the convenience and benefit of the staff and administrators, rather than the welfare of the inmates...

...The most serious objection to such methods of, debate," he concludes, "whether practised by Christians or atheists, is the logical one that terms become eroded and distinctions bkmsed...

...Is it too much to ask that we leave the simplistic mechanics of Slammer or The Streets of San Francisco, and the equally mindless pap of a show like On the Rocks, in order to see ourselves, innocent all until proven guilty, as we are...

...Slammer's stocked with star roles: the old-Church jock-chaplain Breen and his new-breed antagonist, the fellow-cleric White...

...Jails does...