Foolscap
Elie, Paul
CURTAIN GOING UP FOOLSCAP Michael Malone Little, Brown, $19.95, 392 pp. Paul Elie Rare is the contemporary novel that has a happy ending. Twentieth-century literature's...
...In consequence, the novel's life is to be found only in it's author's noisy, irrepressible telling of the story...
...Founded by evangelicals to educate a student body that was "male, rural, local, and as sophisticated as a bootlegger's still hidden behind a patch of jimsonweed," the university now hosts purveyors of the latest critical theories...
...With Foolscap, which is about plays and playwrights, he has contrived a spirited comedy that is as innocently entertaining as a movie musical, advancing toward THE END clunkily but happily...
...The novel falters, however, when Malone must move beyond such devices to do the subtler work of characterization, thematic development, and the like...
...Parts four and five of this five-act novel take place in England, which, incredibly, Theo has never visited before...
...In the great man's presence, Theo, until now a "backstage child," begins to overcome his shyness...
...He stars in a faculty production of Guys and Dolls, then entertains the notion of becoming a famous playwright himself...
...In the satire of Cavendish University that dominates the novel early on, he gives us stereotypical ideologues—strident black feminist, swinging Oxbridge Marxist, liberal female chaplain—without providing any surprises...
...Twentieth-century literature's negative presumptions often let us forget that plots need not end darkly or enigmatically— that once upon a time they generally didn't (see Molière's, say, or many of Dickens's) and that they still don't on Broadway or at the cinema ten-plex...
...When Rexford goes to London, having abandoned his country-singer fiancée Rhodora for the company of Theo's student Jenny Harte, he takes Foolscap with him and leaves his own new play Principles of Aesthetic Distance, still unfinished, with Theo...
...Though he means to create a contrast between trendy contemporary ideologues, who kill art with theory, and great-souled literary throwbacks like Theo and Rexford (and himself, presumably), who give art life and draw life from it, the enemy is so thinly sketched that the contrast never quite emerges...
...For he has written a drama called Foolscap, in the style of Sir Walter Raleigh...
...Just like...
...And when Rexford is killed in an auto accident, Theo decides to return Rexford's favor by completing his last work, hoping to restore his reputation as the century's greatest dramatist...
...The manuscript is discovered, but Theo's ruse is not, and by novel's end he finds himself the husband of Rhodora and the author of two hit plays Raleigh's in the West End, Rexford's on Broadway— while still enjoying the anonymous role that "God, who is the author of all our tragedies," has appointed him to play...
...Though it is a novel about timeless truths and their contemporary debasement, ultimately Foolscap stands or falls not on the verities of plot and character and theme but on the degree to which we find its authorial voice entertaining...
...Even if his distaste were principled, he probably wouldn't weigh in with wicked satire—he seems too nice a guy...
...Theo's claim to academic status is that through his show-biz parents (who raised him in "the church of The-Show-Must-GoOn") he knows the legendary playwright Ford Rexford, who has fled to North Carolina from New York and authorized Theo to write a biography of him...
...Garrulous, alcoholic, considered washed up by the theatrical establishment, four times married and now engaged a fifth time, Rexford is in every way Theo's opposite...
...The stagedirectionlike chapter titles and quotations Commonweal 14 February 1992: 27 from great plays that head each chapter are erudition lightly employed, buoying the novel rather than bogging it down...
...Banal as the resulting comedy is, it's fairly harmless, since Malone aims chiefly to entertain, and for some readers there is nothing more entertaining than finding their own opinions sarcastically confirmed...
...Malone is clever, delighted with his cleverness, and gambling that his delight will stir the reader as much as it has the writer...
...And his distaste for these people seems not to be grounded in any principle deeper than a wariness of all things trendy...
...Surprisingly, though, this expert in drama is unable to stage a single scene in which Theo seems to act independent of his creator...
...Prompted by scholar Winifred Throckmorton's theory that there is a "lost" Raleigh play, Theo contrives to have his own Foolscap forged onto foolscap and hidden in a crumbling church...
...Such paucity of characterization also mars the novel's central figures, its protagonist above all...
...Malone intends to establish Theo Ryan as an alarmingly passive young man, then bring him to vigorous life...
...and Rexford, after revising it and devising a new ending, has declared it a masterpiece...
...Foolscap's plot is carefully constructed, and this care extends to the novel's details as well...
...The author of several plays as well as six previous novels, Malone knows drama from Shakespeare to South Pacific, and his worldview seems that of a cockeyed optimist...
...The parallel between Theo's backstage childhood and his unseen efforts as a collaborator and forger is skillfully spelled out...
...its faculty is divided between old professors for whom "all the world [is] clearly a classroom" and new ones for whom all the world is an international conference on sexuality or textuality...
...Foolscap makes clear that Michael Malone hasn't forgotten...
...But Malone's reliance on easy caricature keeps him from developing the themes on which his plot is founded...
...q 28: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...
...Instead, Malone windily builds up to climactic moments that never arrive, crowding out his protagonist with pithy comments about situations we never really see Theo's therapy sessions, or his lame romantic pursuit of the college chaplain, or his longstanding feud with Peter Sellarslike director Scottie Smith, who "dressed like no other director before him, except possibly Sarah Bernhardt...white knee pants, and a quilted black jacket as iridescent as an oil spill...
...well, a trendy contemporary novel...
...The name Theo, for example, appropriately evokes both "theatre" and (via God, or theos) "author...
...The novel's protagonist is Theo Ryan, a mild-mannered young English Renaissance scholar at Cavendish University, nestled in tiny Rome, North Carolina...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
