Arcadia:
Wheeler, Edward T.
on common cultural truths: sake of commerce. Or one might say, more derstanding, and common sense, falls "Gay?" charitably and more...
...If we hanker for the what is vital grows and will return...
...Arcadia simply lets us off Arcadia when we speak beyond our own PAUL BAUMANN is associate editor of too easily...
...Resem- for Arcadia...
...The anmon sense in which he has worked so prof- offers us a very earthy city, whose assur- tagonist is the country and the conflict one itably...
...Commonweal 18 June 1993: 27...
...Cats...
...A He in Hnn This leads to the technical wrinkle in the novel which is puzzling...
...This is a carefully crafted book, one city mouth meets country morsel is the sense-the rule that tells him he must that seems as symmetrical and patterned as Soap Market where produce is sold...
...The prose runs contin- city and country must be added a third, movie-of-the-week plot if they are to play ually to unmarked blank verse, so rhyth- the urban developer, whose architects and for a mass audience...
...The action of the er's losing...
...Martin Amis and Peter Ack- novel is to a large extent the tracing of Alive, believable, appealing, Margery royd...
...Victor's position is anomalous: he way, this novel places at its center the strugThe biblical conflagration set off by has grown great through produce, through gle between life and death...
...As he escapes from the shad- is to have omniscience, for he speaks the PAUL ELIE is a frequent Commonweal ow cast by the towering Arcadia and faces myth by which the novelist as his own god contributor...
...Don't shave under your arms...
...And this almost scans...
...Such threat to life Vatican II reforms...
...Good in their place...
...His architect promises Victor "Once, twice a year for baseball, al- "Outside, the city...
...for it was in the Soap Market that Victor go out yourself...
...Unlike Ackroyd the smell of its bowels...
...In this City of Man the source Commonweal...
...Instead, lamentably, Wilkes obeys ances are those of survival, of growth from of ingestion and growth...
...Death, which is always "also limitations...
...Squashed green flesh lay in the Jim Crace has found a form which cel- today...
...where life seems most threatened-in the We integrate expertise in slums of the city he loves...
...This same garden was once a Victor's mother, Em, and her struggles to the nuanced fictional world that he has restaurant but now abandoned because the survive with infant Vic...
...We Crace catches so the rhythms of growth, also operate a national evaluation and To order your tape of organic life, in the city that a reader can treatment center serving religious, clergy forget the technical problem and scent the send $7.95, check or and lay ministers...
...It popped between his teeth...
...One might say, simply, building's sway sickened the patrons...
...The narration gets in- A U D O creasingly distant as the climactic scenes (ntt L ~ SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY / /~~, J MEDICAL CENTER unfold: we flit about, watch, overhear, and get mashed in words: "He tossed [the grape] in his mouth...
...at Saint Louis University Medical Center The Burgher is, however, necessary for the meets the special needs of religious, clergy book's structure: The City needs a CityDweller to offer closure...
...Waiting pital, a rejected novice turned militant fires and fevers of the world, we turn our also, darkly, in this novel is a shadow...
...it guides the listener to a place of rest power of the novel lies in the poetic lan- 314/577-8703 guage and not with an individualized and renewed vision...
...Or romance even...
...ways at the park...
...He poked his tongue out at the ladle of his tongue...
...his access to the hisInTheMinistry tories and minds of the characters is never explained, just winked at with a phrase: The program for Psychology and Religion "I raise my head above the parapet again...
...got his start as a hawker so many years "Professional sports, watching of...
...wind: "My tongue's kept busy by the money order to Program Developed for clinical use in the scrap of pear skin lodged between my teeth...
...in Arcadia," has its roots in evil, which, of such speaking is left unfound...
...It culminates in a of Victor, the vegetable king, and his at- provokes a recollection of "Et in Arcadia scene in which Kiernan, crazed and wear- tempt to leave some sort of lasting mon- Ego," words which Crace never lets Death ing the preconciliar cassock, all but bums ument to his life as a wholesale produce speak outright...
...Buy them the cheapest cat food and never use ARCADIA replace the open-air Soap Market...
...The technical problem, in the November 6, 1992 issue...
...But ment: we can rub shoulders with Death in New London, Connecticut...
...his quest for spiritual wholeness while (London Fields) is apocalyptic in theme and At the same time, Crace asks us to be treading a path that demands relatively lit- "postmodern" in form, Crace is generally burghers and to revel in the city, mostly tle in the way of sacrifice...
...El been asked to indulge...
...His is a rhap- psychological, physical and spiritual sody on a fruit, a pear about to spoil...
...and like them he is a Rook's schemes to be the bird of ill omen is the greatest temptation Joseph meets in chronicler of the city...
...Victor 'Mitzi doesn't feel good today' as Jim Crace wishes to transform, to idealize his roots, an excuse when you don't want to Atheneum, $20, 311 pp...
...David Koresh reminds us that such an in- feeding the country to the city, yet he lives Crace's imaginative energy-at least as cident is not unbelievable...
...this won't do...
...for Psychology and Program for Psychology and Religion, That's all that stops me sucking in our city Religion, Behavioral our audio cassette, "Gatherers at the air, and whistling...
...The contemporary thugs, street people, professionals, and managers seem to act more as necessary adjuncts to the theme-the city's survival as organism...
...The narrator announces himself as The Burgher, a oneFor Men An Women time newspaper columnist who published under that by-line...
...In the most fundamental the monastery down...
...Box 15250, Market, much chest-tightening pain over by the many demands of ministry, Rook's asthmatic defeat, but the real St...
...His celebration of the self slips outside the coils achievement is pungent but almost too self- of this narrative...
...Louis MO 63110...
...There is men- Medicine Division, Saint Spring of Being" combines physical ace conveyed in the description of the riot Louis University Medical relaxation with refreshment of mind and and fire which destroy the old Soap spirit...
...Even so, in this in a "misanthropic building," occupying far as characterization is concerned-is novel it is flagrantly inappropriate, a be- a greenhouse roof garden, plagued by not in the present but in the past with trayal of Wilkes's own sensibility and of aphids...
...charitably and more instructively, that short of the uncommon asceticism of an "Don't think so, but then I've never Paul Wilkes, gifted with eloquence, un- artist...
...The major Polycarp, a postulant who commits sui- country roads for fame or wealth or liber- action moves through metaphor to myth: cide, another who ends up in a mental hos- ty...
...Edward T. Wheeler before...
...told in flashback, is Georgian and the that he chose to come down on the wrong The occasion of his eightieth birthday has urban world Crace constructs is brilliantside of the divide between prayers and Victor ruminating on a project, a high-rise ly alive, almost Dickensian in its groprofits, gerrymandering his book for the structure to be called Arcadia which will tesques, its sharpers, and in the symbolic 26: 18 June 1993 Commonweal use of the conflagration which ends Em's life...
...affirmations transform the city's tragedies, finally, comes around to a thematic stateEDWARD T. WHEELER is chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in gobble them up in a rush to rebirth...
...One wishes that affirmative and traditional...
...But he also has impossible omniscience...
...God knows, is real enough in all our cities children...
...The story of another fruit eaten in ebrates the cycle of life in the city...
...human drama...
...Or one might say, more derstanding, and common sense, falls "Gay...
...The organic Wilkes had developed their romance more, whose English Music seeks to tie London metaphor won't be suppressed: "our city" for it lies precisely in the realm of com- to the eternal English Imagination, Crace is alive and the hero of the novel...
...In often bewildering mic and alive is it to incantation: "This is planners would make artificial the city's fashion, this plot enfolds a sinister Brother the sorcery of cities...
...The auguries he performs conthe novel: a person who honors and shares blances end quickly after that: where Amis vey the futility of the Arcadian scheme...
...The issues and use a multi disciplinary team Burgher eats in celebration of the market of psychologist, pastoral counselors, which has sprung again from detritus, from the refuse of the sanitized Arcadia...
...baron...
...Forgive the five o'clock shadow, but I didn't think I'd be inspected MODERN GARDENING today...
...But that metaphysical REVIEWERS regarding, too easily satisfied with the smell premise must be excluded if The Burgher of mortality...
...Created especially for people worn Center, P.O...
...His most recent review appeared the shadow of his own death, The Burgher's redeems the world...
...The abortionist, and the private detective backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out epigraph warns us that the greatest men, Octavius Kiernan, a onetime Latinist who crowds...
...like the tallest buildings, make their marks reviles the monastery for its embrace of The story's focus is on the end times by blocking out the sun...
...nurses, psychiatrists and consultants...
...Em's history, striven to create...
...We do not chase down relationship with the country...
...countryside within...
...the place at which an altogether different rule of common decay...
...In his final mono- and lay ministers who require logue the retired Burgher says "yes" to life psychological treatment...
...Eat seventeen hot That same birthday, however, also sees dogs, drink as many beers as you Jim Crace is of the same gener- the unexpected and bitter split with Rook, can....Yell and scream for whoev- ation of British novelists as Victor's chief of staff...
...To hang his reflections on a crime-ridden a globe artichoke...
Vol. 120 • June 1993 • No. 12
