The pulp of the matter
Rawley, James M. & Moss, Robert F.
to be tied to a precise cultural background in popular, as well as serious, fiction. It is within this ethnic and religious framework that the authors of Mortal Friends and Final Payments ask us...
...These sequences, and there are many of them, show an exceptional grip on the paradoxes of charity...
...And even then, greeting her warmly as he does, he seems not to recognize, or at least not bother about, her obvious infidelity...
...But that does not diminish Isabel's sexual appetite, nor prevent her from acquir- ing two new bedmates--the shallow, philandering husband of a friend, and the marvelous, understanding veterinarian who at last leaves his wife to save Isabel from dying of self-sacrifice as the nurse of a classic harridan to whom she has totally imaginary obligations...
...More lyrical social observations are handled excellently too: My neighborhood is one of those urban pockets that feigns a f'me suburban detachment while abutting on the mouth of a slum...
...True, The Thorn Birds is little more than a trashy romance of the women's magazine variety, but it does offer a consistent style and tone and an emotional commitment to its material that is straightforward and, if anything, naive in its sincerity...
...Another Irish Catholic novel, The Thorn Birds burst the coffers of the publishing industry last year, producing the largest paperback sale in history ($1.9 million...
...The question, "How far must self-denial go...
...Admittedly, it is an academic creation, carefully tex- tured and introspective work, but its extensive similarities to popular fiction are (or ought to be) quite evident...
...The zest is gone which might have made his sloppy plotting and Brady'smereurial character changes acceptable...
...Boccaccio would have been pleased...
...and it must represent conduct as producing swiftly and certainly on the individual the results which in actual life it only produces on the race in the course of many centuries...
...In their hands, the combination is often quite satisfying, though never consistently powerful or profound...
...There is, however, a good deal of ecclesiastical subject matter, including some interesting scenes at the vatican which, in their combination of intrigue and piety, are reminiscent of the novels of Morris West...
...Because of this circumstance perhaps, but also by temperament, he is something of an outsider to all life...
...Brady does not die...
...At least Humbert's Comrnonweah 689...
...The whole charcter of the piece must be allegorical, idealistic, full of generalizations and moral lessons...
...It ends brutally and sadly, yet ultimately it has too drab and commonplace a mood to be called tragic...
...it saps the vitality from the author's attempt to give us an honest, sympathetic account of political and spiritual corruption...
...Powers and Tom McHale by taking on the difficult task of explaining themselves, their faith, their ancestry and their observances...
...Brady has been staying for years with a widowed sister who preceded him to America, and when that sister sees his prosperous, Protestant, adulterous sweetheart--the first serious love interest in Brady's life for a decade and more--she disapproves...
...Final Payments may not fit Shaw's trenchant definition exactly, but it comes remarkably close...
...Carroll has researched the historical background of his novel and has a good sense of theology, but these attributes do not make up for the sheer artificiality of many of his scenes and the flimsy, poorly carpentered narrative structure...
...In spite of the deliberately downbeat tone of the novel, beginning with a funeral and ending with a vast bout of gluttonous depression, there is a lightness of touch throughout that testifies to a sense of humor...
...Even his arbitrariness in plotting, which in other places makes his book absurd, serves here to show his hero's helplessness against his own past and the life it has left him with...
...It was savaged in these pages by Stephen Kroll a year and a half ago...
...In the main, it is quite innocent of the manipulations of plot and character that Carroll must be indicted for...
...It is within this ethnic and religious framework that the authors of Mortal Friends and Final Payments ask us to share their vision of life...
...At this juncture, we should anticipate the charge that it is improper to place Final Payments in the category of popular fiction...
...Like Jonathan Penner's Going Blind and James Dickey's Deliver-ance, it is a sturdy hybrid: a relatively trashy plot, marked by contrivance and sensationalism, but handled with the tools of high art, specifically a technical sophistication and an allusive, savagely ironic tone.9 The above authors have many an honora- ble antecedent for their mixture of melodrama and serious literature (e.g., Shakespeare...
...Hermann doesn't even notice what's going on because he's come to the studio to see whether Ardalion has in his possession still a certain painting Hermann thinks he just saw somewhere else...
...Their treatment of the senior citizens is as much riskier than the norm as it is more rewarding...
...But Carroll has lost a lot in gaining that impression of significance...
...A guilty conscience tells her that her father might never have been stricken if he had not seen her in bed with her first, and till now only, lover...
...may be unanswerable outside of melodrama, despite all the earnest, inspired efforts of men like Mauriac and Bernanos...
...Like Humbert, Her- mann, who is a Russian dmigrd living well in Berlin in the late 1920s, is an outsider, an alien...
...To some extent, the lack of connection with the sources of vulgar excitement makes Mortal Friends seem meaningful...
...The dust jacket copy unnecessarily reveals that Gordon is not far from her apprenticeship as a writer...
...How odd, then, that Maureen Howard, part of the uniform choir of praise that the book has evoked, should attribute the novel's personalized technique to the "natural instincts of a good narrator...
...Isabel's new life entails a career (it is after all the neo- feminist seventies) and she finds a job as a social worker, evaluating the care that old people are getting from private families who have volunteered to support them for a state payment...
...His son is murdered, but his grandson lives...
...The modern, post-Godfather audience seems to feel corrup- tion deserves a break...
...Like Humbert, Hermann is an aloof and rather jaundiced observer of life, a man who takes an ironic and bemused attitude toward the foibles of the human race-- a race of which he is not quite a part...
...In fact, we have to take the title, which Stoppard and Fassbinder's f'tlm retains from Nabokov's novel, as something of a joke...
...Hermann Hermann himself bears a good deal more than just a vague resemblance to a later, more famous character in Nabokov's fiction, Humbert 'Humbert...
...Curiously enough, this driven, striven-for prose makes the heroine seem less unique, more nearly an ordinary member of the crew of academic verse-or prose-makers...
...As a popular novel, Mortal Friends is inferior to The Godfather and even to The Thorn Birds, being less original than the former and less emotionally compelling than the latter...
...The similes range from fair to excellent, but there are far too many of them, and almost all are obviously reached for...
...Indeed, Her- mann outdoes Humbert on this score...
...It is also relevant that McCullogh is superior to Carroll when it comes to handling children and to supplying secondary charac- ters with a defined personality, though she borrows the brushes of other pulp writers for these sketches...
...like the question, "What is a Catholic...
...In- deed, a certain willingness to be guided or used by others may account for the most pervasive flaw in Final Payments: a tortured, academic, simile-seeking style that is out of character for the narrator-mask and unfulfilling on its own account...
...Consider the following: "Eleanor and I wept until our faces felt fragile as balloons...
...They can profitably be compared to Puzo, whose,gangland epic achieved a success that, within the framework of popular culture, probably redefined America's conception of Italian gangsters, and of Italians in general, by offering a historical/sociological rationale for the underworld...
...Cardinal Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorn Birds is similarly spared by God, and punished through his son...
...Even Humbert Humbert's feeling for Lolita is not real human passion, but only obses- sion...
...And so the strongly observed, deli- cately touched anecdotes go on, enriching the plot that binds them in place...
...and Hermann is like Humbert in this, too...
...A senile old woman who would be happy anywhere is cared for efficiently but coldly...
...Screen ARS GRATIA ARTIS FASSBINDER'S 'DESPAIR' W HEN a raw feeling like Despair is surrounded by four artists in such perfect control of their talents as Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Stoppard, Rainer Fassbin- der and Dirk Bogarde, the original emotion is hardly recogniz- able in the result...
...Kroll's critique was intelligent, but he might have been more generous with the novel if he examined it alongside the far more pretentiousMortal Friends...
...And Brady, callous twenty times over to blood and violent death, is so innocent sexually that his middle-aged mistress's erotic skill puzzles and overwhelms him...
...Consider, for instance, how unmoved Hermann is when he catches his wife Lydia (Andrea Ferreol) inflagrante delecto in the studio of her cousin, a painter named Ardalion (Volker Spengler...
...Melodrama," said the great Protestant Irishman Bernard Shaw, .9 should be a simple and sincere drama of action and feeling, kept well within that vast tract of passion and motive which is common to the philosopher and the laborer...
...On the other hand, a family with a case of gambling fever, though slovenly caretakers in conventional terms, succeed in integrating their elderly charges into their hectic, charmingly raffish home life...
...In order to feel such a profound disgust for life, one must first have a great passion for it, and passion is definitely not in Hermann's nature...
...Its changes became more visible as I drove through it with Liz and Eleanor, who had left it...
...Carroll, that connoisseur of shadows, has hitched a ride on Puzo's bandwagon...
...Isabel Moore, Gordon's heroine, has spent eleven years caring for her father after he suffered a paralyzing stroke...
...In those passagesmand they are numerous--where Catholicism and 27 October 1978:686 some real depth and genuine religious feeling...
...And without zest, the implausibility gains prominence...
...For the last thing that the hero, Hermann Hermann (Bogarde), would be likely to feel is any- thing so possessing as despair...
...her own natural contentment means that the care she receives must be labeled good care, no matter how lacking in warmth or sympathy it may be...
...A scenario like this is certainly not an unsuitable blueprint for pulp treatment, but it is only an underpinning this simple that could support the intelligence, social conscience and religious insights that Gordon brings to her book...
...The same is true of Brady's machina- tions on behalf of his priggish son and his nullity of a nephew...
...N SHORT, Gordon is a fine talent who has chosen to use Itheatrical tricks to increase reader interest...
...A whole dimension of dreary, domestic Catholicism can be glimpsed in that disapproval...
...Time has contrib- uted the information that her manuscript was received coldly on Publisher's Row until--at the suggestion of an old writing teacher, Elizabeth Hardwick--she converted what was origi- nally a third person narrativeto first person...
...The love affair goes no place in particular...
...For I had not left it...
...All three writers have linked themselves to more uncom-promising literary talents like J.F...
...Now, when she is thirty years old, her father dies, and the novel begins...
...Not until he's found the painting, and seen that it only vaguely resembles the one he saw elsewhere, does he take cognizance of Lydia's presence...
...But it was not always so...
...Many of Carroll's minor people (e.g., the nephew) and even some of his principals--are no more than department store mannequins with a name.tag sewn on...
...The Irishmen in McCullogh's book are not very Irish, be- yond having red hair...
...Soon, no doubt we shall all recover our patriotism by realiz- ing that a government that can thwart all its i~eals, giving way to cynicism, hypocrisy and criminality, and still be one of the word'S great powers, must be on the fight track somehow...
...What might be mere scholastic exercises are, under Gordon's sure touch, effective vignettes...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
