Saint Maybe/The Night Travelers

...He had the Bedloe golden-brown hair, golden skin, and sleepy-looking brown eyes, although his mouth was his mother's, a pale beige mouth quirking upward at the comers...

...A reader has no chance...

...Did Ian's remarks about Lucy send his drunken brother offto crash his car into a stone wall...

...belief...

...when she wakes from a nap, and "La...

...I could see no point in plowing through yet another patronizing jeremiad about the decline and fall of the labor movement (and the malfeasance of its leaders) written by yet another disillusioned liberal intellectual...

...The PERSONAL COMPANIONS PACQUET contains the basic tools you need to make meaningful your personal journey through the Enneagram...

...since he is endlessly bringing up God or good works or Bible school, since he is endlessly brothering and sistering, readers are embarrassed to be in his presence, wanting to avert their eyes...

...The first, when the protagonist, Mary Kerr Harbison, is a very small child, is the absence of a kitten, last seen in her mother's lab coat pocket...

...It's easier to die, so she does...

...one wants to tell him that children are not ,to be taken on as reparation, that life is not a duty...

...By indirection and by secret they communicate when Jeff leaves again to take on his own kind of war work...

...It is hard to read a novel with eyes averted...

...How much of a life is, on the other hand, up to chance...

...And how do the deliberate and the accidental interweave...

...She is responsible...

...After one semester of college, Ian drops out to take care of the three children, a decision he reaches after a conversion experience...

...They believed that every part of their life was absolutely wonderful...

...These questions are some of the questions the novel asks us to think about as we watch what becomes of the Bedloes...

...THE NIGHT TRAVELERS Elizabeth Spencer Viking, $21.95, 366 pp...

...All of them, the whole bunch, are middle-class Emersonian individualists...

...Outside U.S...

...He entered the kitchen...

...I CHART OF THE ENNEAGRAM PERSONALITY TYPES, a schema comparing traits of the nine personality types in various areas such as talents, communication, co-dependency . . . . and a large diagram indicating directions for growth (8 1/2 x 24 1/2...

...Pale, beige, drab, flat: these are the qualities that interest Tyler, and that may leave a reader longing for O'Connor's passion and flamboyance...

...Whatever the events of her life, she returns to the struggle with her mother, a struggle that cannot be resolved any more than life can be...

...The power of Elizabeth Spencer's telling of it is extraordinary, and though the mother-daughter relationship is at the periphery of the story of the young girl growing up and marrying, it is at the center of the novel's effect...

...With no more sense of mortality than any teenager, Ian faces up to that--and equally to his own sense of guilt over his brother's death...

...Looking back romantically to what he thinks of as labor's Golden Age, he says on page one of his exciting book that organized labor "was a cause in the thirties...

...Now it is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing crawling offto Bal Harbour to die...

...We see very little of that life, so we can't know...

...Socrates believed that the soul was the structure of personality, a view not discordant with Christian REVIEWERS CRYSTAL GROMER teaches humanities at Vermont Technical College...

...MSGR...

...How did it outlive George Meany...

...It will add further to historical focus to note that Geoghegan's own book is being more widely and more favorably reviewed than all but the best of the labor books that came out in the thirties...

...this will hold her in pretty good stead in life, although sometimes, from her earliest days, she has to walt a long and uncomfortable time...

...I ENNEAGRAM INVENTORY to help discern your personality type...

...Something happens...

...LABOR WILL RISE AGAIN--MAYBE WHICH SIDE ABE YOU ON...

...Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back Thomas Geoghegan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19.95, 287 pp...

...No longer Ian, he is Brother Ian...

...Not quite...

...Tumed off by this kind of condescending yuppie rhetoric, I was tempted to stop reading the book then and there...

...She does her best...

...He opened the door...

...That effect is both disquieting and enriching...

...4606 Centerview #155, San Antonio, TX 78228-1203...

...Only Bee's younger son, Ian, seems restless with his mother's storytelling...

...This kitten had clawed the furniture, made her mother angry...

...At the loss of her son, she is suddenly frail, and not just because of her arthritic knees...

...she applauds her elder son's decision to go directly from high-school football captain to post office clerk, bypassing college, as a sign of knowing what he wanted, and that he is still at the post office a dozen or so years later, a sign that he is contented...

...For all of that, like any medium kind of guy he has images of himself as the hero of his own life...

...It is 1965, and we are told at the outset that the family is known emphatically as the Bedloe family, not just the Bedloes...

...Her face grows tight and fragile when the elder Bedloe son, Danny, introduces his parents to "the woman who's changed my life" and it turns out that this woman, Lucy Dean-- who with her long black hair and black lashes and white skin and ruby mouth and tiny waist could be cast as the virgin Snow White--is in reality the divorced mother of two and a waitress at the Fill 'Er Up Care...

...They are that kind of family...

...Beguiled, however, by Geoghegan's literary style (he writes like an angel, albeit a bit too preciously at times), I swallowed hard and read the book from cover to cover in two long sittings...

...There is no completeness in The Night Travelers...

...How deftly, astutely, sympathetically, Anne Tyler draws her portraits, as, for instance, when she shows us how their son's death ages Bee and Doug Bedloe in an instant...

...Indeed, by his own repeated admission, Geoghegan is "obsessed with the thirties, with John L. Lewis, and with the New Deal...

...rather, she is spirited, and a fire lights up her small frame and drives her to do and to have what she most loves...

...Loneliness and loss and hope share unequal places in Mary Kerr's full heart...

...Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was...

...funds payable to LIFEWINGS, unLTD...

...Walking up the steps to his house, he sees his film biography: "Ian climbed the steps...

...The eldest, Agatha, is "the kind of child who breathed through her mouth...

...Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs...

...But we can transfer the question...

...She is stolid...

...again until somebody picks her up...

...rather there are guesses, suggestions-those intimations with which we get through life...

...In other words, to judge from the reception the book has had, Geoghegan is not alone in thinking that, with labor flat 658: Commonweal...

...So begins the description of him that concludes, "He was a medium kind of guy, all in all...

...Mary Kerr grows up---and grows up to be a dancer, her first passion in North Carolina in the 1960s...

...It is as though she is able to lifeproof her family by making them into stories...

...Geoghegan, who tends to exaggerate, observes that once upon a time (meaning, of course, in the mythical thirties) there were many labor books...

...This knowledge is something he cannot share with his mother, whose gloss on life does not include death...

...She must resist her mother in everything, since her mother would take away her profession, her husband, her child ---her very soul if that were possible-- but for all of Mary Kerr's resistance, there are times when she wants to give in, when the child's longing to be loved by her mother overcomes her...

...One wants to shake Ian and make him live...

...We see her first as a kind of elfin child, small and delicate, a sprite: "she seemed not to weigh anything, to be an essence with nothing solid about her...

...Mary Kerr knows this, but she crawls out on the roof in search of Mopsy anyway, full of the ache of the childhood experience of loss, understanding and not understanding at the same time...

...What happens--and what they cannot take in stride-- is that not very long after his marriage to Lucy and the birth of Lucy's youngest child, Danny dies, and for this there are no stories, no revisions that will do any good...

...The mother, Bee Bedloe, especially believes this, and she is the family architect, continually striving to make constructions, more artful than any situation comedy plot, that fit events into her view and make them the Bedloe view...

...It is Mary Kerr's fate to experience a great deal of loss, often enough far too often--as the result of her mother's manipulations...

...Ian is the kind of teenager who charms everyone, to whom no 656: Commonweal SAINT MAYBE Anne Tyler Knopf, $22, 337 pp...

...it is subtle, and it is constantly changing...

...He is as impassioned DISCOVER EXCITING INSIGHTS INTO YOURSELF...

...we can think about the people who change other people's lives...

...Ian is profoundly passive, and even the woman he marries, a woman of prodigious drive and quirky, interesting intelligence, a woman very much like Muriel in The Accidental Tourist, cannot wrest him from it...

...The power of the relationship between Kate and Mary Kerr Harbison is eerie, lifelike...

...VIA THE ENNEAGRAMA valuable framework f o r understanding personality...

...GEORGE G. HIGGINS, an adjunct lecturer in the department of theology at the Catholic University of America, is a longtime adviser to the labor movement...

...The novel is strongest when the three orphaned children are on center stage, for no one accords to children the seriousness and the fullness of treatment, the complexity and the humor, that Anne Tyler does, and it is her greatest strength...

...add $6.50) 8 November 1991:657 about his political effort as Mary Kerr is about her dancing, and he ends up taking a route that forces him underground, hence the Night Travelers of the title...

...But only a taste of Flannery O' Connor filters through Anne Tyler's rendition of The Church of the Second Chance...

...This is a veritable tour de force...

...Send $21.90 (includes shipping and handling) in U.S...

...Hundreds, I'd say, that were published in the thirties and forties during labor's Golden Age...

...BOOKS Never far from home nne T y l e r ' s new novel, her twelfth, opens as many of her books do, with the moment just before the event occurs that will change the way a family is living its life...

...it then is simply and permanently absent...

...Danny will always be dead...

...DAVID HOLLENBACH, S.J., teaches at Boston College...

...She calls her husband a popular teacher when he is a poor one (she also calls him an "educator...

...MARTIN E. MARTY is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, senior editor of the Christian Century, and author of many books on American religion and culture...

...DON WYCLIFF, a former New York Times reporter and editorial writer, is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...

...Perhaps I am being naive, but I take this phenomenon to mean that Geoghegan may (not necessarily will, but just may) live long enough to see the American labor movement once again become as strong as it was, or as strong as he thinks it was, in the thirties...

...George G. Higgins homas Geoghegan has been aptly described by one sympathetic reviewer as "a child of the sixties reliving the social struggles of the thirties in the Chicago of the nineties...

...They are too old to take on Lucy's three children, for Lucy, too, dies----of depression and sleeping pills and, it may be, the magnitude of the tasks in front of her: to clean her kitchen, to clean her children, to find a plumber, to find a husband...

...Early on in the first chapter I discovered which side Geoghegan is on now that labor is fiat on its back...

...VICTOR A. KRAMER teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta...

...How much does one family member affect another, all the others...

...He may be a saint, but he's awfully boring...

...So deeply ingrained is their image as all-American family-mother homemaker, father high-school teacher and coach, and three children--that the neighborhood fondly shares a collective memory of them long since out of date, as we might share a memory of a television show cancelled decades ago, "Ozzie and Harriet," say, or "Leave It to Beaver...

...But, adolescent when we meet him, he accepts his mother's stories and is full of his own besides...

...JAMES T. FISHER teaches in the American Studies Department at Yale University...

...In giving up his soul to God, or at least to the church, Ian abandons his personality...

...PAUL KANTZ is a university fellow in international relations at Yale University...

...Youngest of all, the baby Daphne sings out "La...

...It was more than worth the effort...

...His most recent book is Justice, Peace, and Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic World (Crossroad, 1990...

...In almost every bookstore," he writes, "there would be a whole section for 'Labor' the way there is today for 'Self-Help' or 'Sex.' And if you go down to the old used-bookstores around the University of Chicago, and climb the creaky wooden stairs to the basement, and keep from fainting over the mold and mildew you can still see some of these 'Labor' books...

...teacher will give less than a C even though he hasn't earned it...

...Crystal Gs.omes...

...At the dinner table, he talks about God with Sister Harriet (who's pretty beige too, and somewhat stocky) as though a place had been laid for Him...

...she makes light of her daughter's propensity for procreation (a force so formidable that the children are named in alphabethical order...

...But the parent Bedloes take this in stride, "smiling extra hard as if someone had just informed them they were being photographed...

...In one scene, we see her when she is about seven years old, worrying about the overflowing toilet and her overdosing mother...

...She lets us know these children immediately...

...Thomas is bright and nimble and left with the younger sibling's useless refrain, "You're not the boss of me," pulling the covers over his head...

...He is decidedly on the side of the angels--i.e., of a strong and effective labor movement--and has had it up to here with "American liberals, even American radicals, [who] have more in common with the Reagan Right than with us...

...Jefferson Blaise, her boyfriend and later her husband, is one of the student leaders...

...Hundreds...

...Just as Ian can make of the ordinary the potentially heroic ("He set his books on the table"), Bee has always been able to take in large chunks of life and order them...

...Ian was seventeen and, like the rest of his family, large-boned and handsome and easygoing, quick to make friends, fond of a good time...

...Elizabeth Spencer's novel is as full of passion as Anne Tyler's is deliberately absent of it, and for that reason, though it is not as beautifully crafted as Tyler's, it is far more powerful and far more satisfying to read...

...Did Lucy change Danny's life, as he said...

...I PROFILES OF THE ENNEAGRAM: WAYS OF COMING HOME TO YOURSELF, a book to help guide you along your journey of self- and other- discovery...

...Critics of all ideological persuasions-right, left, and center--are vying with one another to promote Which Side Are You On...

...In every action she is countered by her mother, and Kate Harbison is fierce, as determined as her daughter to have her way, with far more power behind her...

...By night and by stealth they travel--to Canada for a time, where Mary Kerr has a baby and a depression so profound it leads her to a thwarted suicide...

...And in fact labor books are still being published in significant numbers in the nineties--though many if not most of them are decidedly bearish about the future of the American labor movement...

...She reaches late adolescence and early love in the tumult of the student strikes and protests against the war in Vietnam...

...Ian himself early on notes how embarrassed people are when the subject of God is brought up...

...But this does not mean she is insubstantial...