Budding Prospects
Kaplan, Howard
field, becomes a mainstay of the lecture circuit for another season. The best ad- vertisements do not just manipulate us; they help us explain our world. The rest of the book takes up a variety of...
...The zabbaleen are the garbage collec- tors of Cairo...
...his mother laughed...
...For would-be dope farmers and the naturally curious, Budding Prospects earns good marks as an elementary how- to...
...The only thing that links them is Paepcke's interest in them...
...Flies, infection, and disease are everywhere...
...Ironically Allen does very little in the end to elucidate Paepcke's own outlook, the one perspective that might have tied Pot potboiler BUDDINS PROSPECTS: A PASTORAL T. Coraghesmn Boyle Vikin~ $16.95, 333 pp...
...The rest of the book takes up a variety of topics in American cultural history, especially the Great Books movement of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler and the development of Aspen, Colorado, as a cultural haven...
...Boyle, his eye on the action not the players, rations out one or two traits per person...
...She studied literature at the Sorbonne, and for about thirty years after joining her order she taught in rather comfortable circum- stances...
...Venal schemes aside, the above is buzz-name description, and all of us employ it in normal conversation.9 But what in speech amounts to a mildly lazy habit, in fiction looks positively slothful...
...He's used to it," she said...
...She was particularly concerned with the plight of the women, and taught them family-planning methods (though she didn't accept the suggestion that she should sponsor a government clinic, since that might involve sterilization, and she drew the line at that...
...Wife- beating is common, and the husband is the undisputed ruler of his house, often a tyrannical one...
...a target mounted.., like an artist's easel...
...By book's end, faithful Felix is ready to accommodate her...
...For this Boyle brazenly drags in the old sexy-woman-who-turns-out-to-be-a-man routine, a decrepit anecdote about which Generosity on the dungheap Paul Theroux, in The Great Railway Bazaar, says, "I think I've heard that one before...
...He cheats on his wife...
...The writing itself is chock-full of screen references...
...Felix, thirty-one-year- old narrator of T.9 Boyle's Budding Prospects, fails in...
...As in all melodrama, action is every- thing here...
...Emmanuelle saw a little boy pick up a rotten tomato and tried to keep him from eating it...
...10016 For the enclosed $9 send the next 11 issues (6 months of Com...
...That doesn't matter: you don't judge a book of this sort in the ordinary way...
...That scowling visage, never described, belongs in reality to Nick Nolte...
...Some of Sister Emmanuelle's most frustrating experiences involved her work with women, and some of the most excruciating passages in To Share With God's Poor deal with their often terrify- ing condition: here is the story of a young girl smothered to death to protect the family honor (she was a Christian who had fallen in love with a Muslim...
...Boyle, not without liter- ary scruples, is trying to soften the wham-bam crudities of his comic-strip plot...
...But the account cries out for a reconstruction of Paepcke's stance...
...Next page, different context, he tosses out this: "I compared myself to . . . James Dean...
...But the novel is strictly cautionary, the outlook anti-El Dorado...
...To their credit T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, and George Bernard Shaw stayed home...
...he was a metaphysical absolutist for whom the medieval synthesis was normative...
...In another ("Heart of a Champion' '), Lassie makes it with a coyote, leaving Timmy for dead under fallen timber...
...When Saper's 300- plus-pound mental-defective son goes berserk --a scene played for laughs by the way --Felix is reminded of the rag- ing King Kong...
...The sky raining blood, no letup in sight --that's one of them...
...rusted machine parts .9 . . like the remnants of a forgotten civilization...
...it is something more important, a profoundly good book, by a woman of radiant cour- age and generosity...
...But there is much more to this book than tales of woe...
...people who have reason to hate, forgive...
...clumps of mist.., like balls of hair" --those are all from a single medium-sized paragraph, ran-domly selected...
...The baby she was hold- ing was covered with flies...
...Allen strains his argu- ment to the breaking point when he tries to tell us that Hutchins and Moholy-Nagy were fundamentally engaged in the same enterprise because of their "historical, communal, and metaphysical yearn-ings...
...Likewise, the redneck Lloyd Sapers is Warren Oates in overalls...
...People who have almost nothing share what little they have...
...John Gas'vey S ISTER EMMANUELLE Cinquin is a Belgian member of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion...
...I was ogling Savoy's butt," says Felix, "with all the mendi- cant passion of a Charlie Chaplin, out at the elbows, pressing his nose to a plate- glass window rife with cream puffs and napoleons...
...This isn't a great book...
...Nor, say, is Gesh and Felix's bar-prowling interlude in San Francisco...
...It's a cheap lit- tle labor-saving device...
...Gesh, for instance, one of two sidekicks, is a big bull of a man with a snorting temper to match...
...The latest wrinkle, according to my Santa Cruz friend, is planting on out-of- the-way, publicly owned lands...
...The good guys are slavering leches, too, but they at least are single.9 Petra, a long- legged arts and craftsy type, is the damsel in distress...
...From a strictly literary point of view a reader could find things to complain about...
...One Officer the book together...
...But he overdoes the fancy-talk by half...
...the end to make a million at marijuana farming...
...You're much better off writing pulp like this...
...Shaw replied that he re- fused to reduce Goethe to an object of conspicuous consumption...
...She comes from a com- fortable background: her father was a lingerie exporter in Brussels...
...Modern consumer culture is in part an arena in which great minds sell their image as lofty embodi- ments of inherited wisdom or advanced knowledge...
...Rather than build a situation step by step, you blithely drop a name, and the name does the job while you take five...
...In fact, Hutchins never went through the modern experience of doubt that lay behind the German Bauhaus...
...Though she lays the priapic hero after proper introductions, her pur- ity of heart is uncompromised: eventu- ally, she says, she wants to have chil- dren...
...During her years with the ragpickers she managed to build a school, a vocational center, medical facilities, and recreational fields...
...Boyle's first book, Descent of Man, is a collection of weirdly inventive tales that read like sick jokes...
...Im- plicit in Allen's data is an argument about Paepcke's paradigmatic place in twentieth-century life: the collector of precious minds as well as precious art, the consumer of any and all ideas as long as they are "great...
...The Cairo ragpickers live on rubbish mounds and sort through what they collect from the wealthy homes of Cairo, recycling what can be recycled, feeding the edible scraps of food to domestic animals, and the best of the refuse to children...
...On her first visit to the ragpickers Sister Trial Subscription Offer--11 Issues for $9 COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...He roughs people up for the fun of it...
...Meanwhile there's plenty of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll to ensure Boyle's success if not Felix's...
...One page later, survey- ing the damage, Felix feels "as if my life had somehow become confused with a Fellini movie...
...And amiable Felix is the bearded Jeff Bridges...
...Her respect and deep love for the people she serves (and for their religions, Coptic Orthodoxy and Is- lam) permeate her writing...
...He does report that Paepcke was an intensely private man and that it was hard to know what he thought...
...An upstanding old hippie, he smiles as he sinks back to poverty-line limbo...
...Yet none of it much qual- ifies as tip-roaring stuff.9 Early on, ap15 June 1984:379 ropos of nothing in particular, Gesh asks his buddies one night, "What's the closest you ever came to dying...
...like the author, he's out to score big...
...Beneath the hip California coating lies old-fashioned melodrama...
...they pick it up...
...I perked up at this...
...Sister Emmanuelle's story of her work and its meaning jumps here and there, and the feistiness which bore such a'great fruit in getting schools and vocational centers built can be off- putting on the page...
...Zabbal means dung...
...That's about it on Gesh, but don't let the strange name fool you...
...Plainly, Boyle has Hollywood on the brain --Hollywood script deals, that is...
...She was in her sixties when she Commonweal' s '84 visited Cairo in 1971 and encountered the zabbaleen...
...As awesome as her own compassion is, Sister Em- manuelle shows us something even more remarkable: the love and generosity and compassion which can be found in the lives of the poorest alad most abject...
...This is the heart of the Gospel, and we must be grateful to Sister Emmanuelle (who at age seventyTO SHARE WITH gOD'S POOR Sister Emmanuelle Harper & Row, $5.95, 176 pp...
...But these subjects are only loosely tied to each other and to the first part of the book...
...Sister Emmanuelle moved into a re- furbished goats' shed...
...The constant name-dropping is part of a larger habit, almost an addiction: Boyle can't keep away from a simile...
...But happi- ness for him means more than a fat bankroll...
...Walter Paepcke and other well endowed philanthropists, only some of whom share Paepcke's commercial interest, bask in the reflected glow of intellectual and artistic celebrities...
...For his international Goethe Festival at Aspen in 1949 Paepcke purchased the services of Albert Schweitzer and Jose Ortega y Gasset for $5000 each, Thornton Wilder for $2500, and numer- ous lesser known academics for $1000 each...
...Between predators both man and beast, natural disasters and narcs, the marijuana business sounds risky at best...
...Unfortunately, those campfire stories requested by Gesh in Budding Prospects are nowhere near as inspired as these early efforts by Boyle...
...Boyle patiently takes us from sowing to reaping to rolling and smoking, with play-by- play commentary provided by Dowst, a Yalie botany whiz...
...Like the Savior at Golgotha, Vogelsang stayed three days...
...We get, among other things, fistfights, friskings, and pukings, one night in jail, and several in a dive called Shirelle's Bum Steer.9 The protagonist battles fires and" bears and a sleazy blackmailer...
...The infant mor- tality rate is a staggering forty percent...
...Insects will buzz around the colossus, but not I. I take my hat off, and hold my tongue...
...Of course having seen these folks before in the movies, we can fill in the details ourselves...
...Jerpbak, a clean-cut cop, represents the stock Villain.9 Mirror shades are his fear- some prop...
...monweal) to: Name Address City, State,Zip [] I prefer a full.year subscription at $24 6/15/84 Commonweal: 380...
...They may both have liked Paepcke and they may both have tried to sell culture to the masses, but their outlooks and histor- ical roles were much more dissimilar than Allen thinks...
...Howard ICaplan y , OUR basic potboiler hero has dollar signs in his eyes...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 12
