Body & Soul:

...But only Doctorow-could be measured...

...These are not liv- Stop-Time its pessimistic cast-the nar- modem music...

...less fat boy at boarding school-from a The novel begins promisingly enough...

...optimism within the larger security of ous and sometimes tedious particularity...

...Body & Soul Conroy paints these figures with very is suffused by a longing for the purity of broad strokes...

...the cold and shallow Upper reader) chastening life lessons, ultimateEast Side socialite, impervious to art...

...The New York writers, like Tom Wolfe or Ber- through the night, drunk, heading for a substitution of Schoenbergian atonality for nard Malamud, who've done them far crash -but also its vivid and penetrating the birds and the bees in a standard commore compellingly...

...But Life, it insists, is indeed a story, a series from his face with the back of his the new novel's characters remain stub- of peaks and valleys along a gradually hand and then look at the back of bornly fuzzy and shallow...

...He isn't moving on, he to "the work...

...He might wipe the sweat people tick that made Stop-Time sing...

...A LONG-AWAITED ENCORE BODY &SOUL Soul, a sprawling bildungsroman takFrank Conroy ing up the youthful adventures of a muHoughton Mifflin, $24.95, 450 pp...

...while, however, Conroy himself (who clever and tough...

...ideas deeply adolescent assumption was that life his hero, by now an internationally known come to them not abstractly, but with a will never change, that it goes nowhere...

...but Conroy's version -Ken Woodward, currently is director of the famed Writers' of the street urchin is softened by a Religion Editor, NEWSWEEK Workshop at the University of Iowa) quiet, baffled wonder: Cloth $29.95 managed but a single slim volume of sto- In the general torpor specific noisries in a quarter-century (Midair, 1984), es stood out in high relief-the Available at your invoking anxieties-shared, according to wheezing of a bus, the clacking, local bookstore or interviews, by the author himself-of rattling rush of the el, angry voices Paulist Press, that nightmare of literary nightmares, a from inside a tenement, the crash of 997 Macarthur Blvd., NJ 07430 one-book career...

...but it's an opTime so terrific, and it's what Conroy moral education...

...as is, we are his ear for original language...

...ing up fatherless in postwar New York, Frank Conroy was thirty in 1967 when he and both explore, to a greater or lesser depublished Stop-Time, his memoirs of a gree, the same terrain: isolation, imagiPAUL childhood marked by the absence of a dis- nation, and the redemptive power of art...

...Mean- ing New York City boys, growing up Hebblethwaite could...

...The tone of the novel is mented by Holocaust nightmares...

...a storefront gate-thick sounds ris- 1-201-825-7300 Now, at last, along comes Body & ing with an eerie clarity against the Commonweal 5 November 1993: 3 unnatural silence...

...they're sim- earnest profundity, Body & Soul reads like, protected campus worlds-islands of ply there to be seen in all their mysteri- well, a first novel: which, after all, it is...

...Praised lavishly for its intelligent can- him piano, Conroy takes us on a guiddor by such authorities as Norman Mailer ed tour through a long-lost New York...

...In the shadow of the Third BOOK REVIEW against which other talented practi- Avenue el, Claude shines shoes, collects tioners-from Annie Dillard to Theodore bottles, and indulges in a little petty "This is a book I wish I'd Weesner to Alice McDermott to E.L...

...Nowhere does it times terrifying otherness of the world...

...On an empty street blue, all else was trivial...

...Weighing in at 450 pages, the book clearYRaced Richards Cooper ly means to put all doubts to rest: "a big novel...

...less like real people than props Surprisingly, Conroy seems to have This is the quiet intensity that made Stop- furnishing the stage of Claude Rawlings's grown up into an optimist...

...dreaming...

...warm but powerfully earnest...

...Harsh judgments are the reward for comed him, his own was cleansed...

...He was often dizzy...

...worse, they're rative structure is framed by an account becoming a well-educated young man, and secondhand types, inherited from other of the grown-up Conroy driving wildly we're getting into deep stuff here...

...With its hopeful mesbland straightforwardness ("A quiet ide- story...

...You're on your way to ing characters but types...

...Their world is in- "An adult [Conroy wrote) recognizes an unwitting and coincidental reunion corrigibly sensual, and in Body & Soul, petty problems for what they are and with his long-lost father-who turns out as in his earlier memoirs, the author ren- transcends them through his higher pre- (surprise...

...in the characters with whom he surrounds Behind such sentimental manipulations his wunderkind...

...he might watch his own feet, as if Body & Soul in vain for the kind of pin- Body & Soul, on the other hand, exto reassure himself that he was not point-accurate insight into what makes udes progress and higher preoccupations...

...It deals Claude (and the kindly artist...

...concert pianist in his midtwenties, into taste, a shape, a sound...

...to be a jazz pianist in a London ders this sensuality superbly...

...turbed and alcoholic father...

...his hand...

...timism that strains and creaks in its does best: carefully detailing the texture The problem goes right to the heart of dogged insistence on making everything of consciousness, with its dizzying inti- the differences between the two books...

...tional...

...the cept the immediate experiences of his ly offering salvation in a deep commitment shabby, soulful Eastern European Jew, tor- life at face value...

...It's a good enough book, given what tends calm, prosperous postwar America") to As its title implies, Stop-Time relies for to get published...

...One searches vinced he isn't going anywhere...

...A child has no choice but to ac- gether four-handed, setting the house on with the action of Claude's budding ca- fire with their shared passion for jazz, reer, however, things start to go bad...

...fit together, on delivering every last lesmations of self and the formidable, some- Stop-Time was both a reflection upon, and son and missing piece...

...where his mentor, Weisfeld, teaches nity to the Catholic Church...

...The novel tion, no part in a larger story, because from asked to accept it, and other such moments, offers a full menu of bad writing, from Frank's point of view there is no larger straightforwardly...

...Its protagonist's mactic scene, when the author maneuvers cious, are nevertheless children...

...Con- Claude unaware of the true identity of the roy knows a lot about music, and uses it man next to him, yet inexplicably drawn in fashioning a successful career out of to him...

...It just isn't a wonderful Mushy Love Writing ("As her soul wel- its success upon stuckness...

...The various people who pass ing-of-age moment might be hilarious, Similarly, Conroy seems to have lost through young Frank's life have no func- were there any irony to it...

...You're jovial black janitor with a heart of gold The lack of a redemptive telos, the re- not a kid anymore," Weisfeld counsels and a bottomless fund of folk wisdom fusal to discern or impose a "story" upon Claude when the boy confesses bewil("You got to decide if the mad runs you, often painful and difficult events, gave derment at the twelve-tone system of or you run the mad...

...The two musicians play toAs soon as Body & Soul busies itself it were...

...The problem lies fect" to the last detail...

...The mode of book...

...ounger writers who've Such comments notwithstanding, it's hard not to read Body & Soul as an up- PAUL VI pulled off that rare feat, a wonderful first book, dated Stop-Time...

...sical prodigy named Claude Rawlings...

...Both books have as The first Modern Pope work on under a hefty heroes a musically precocious boy grow- by Peter Hebblethwaite burden of expectations...

...Hebblethwaite's and William Styron, Stop-Time went on Food automats dispense franks and beans book is worth reading to become that writer's dream, a true for a quarter, neighborhood saloons on for the sheer pleasure ref word-of-mouth book, remaining contin- V-E Day offer free beer for anyone in its biographical richuously in print decade after decade, win- uniform, and in the background ness " -John M. Todd, ning new generations of readers and Rosemary Clooney sings "Come On-a THE NEW YORK TIMES setting a standard for childhood narratives My House...

...He's like Doctorow's enterpris- written...

...larceny...

...A collection Alas, however-I might as well say it right of sharp images retrieved "from the very off-lovers of Stop-Time are in for a big vi THE edge of memory," Stop-Time anatomized disappointment...

...the simply is...

...The scene has the the dubious and scattered materials of sweetness of Hollywood product: "perClaude's circumstances...

...11 34: 5 November 1993 Commonweal...

...a recreation of, the extreme limitedness creak more loudly than in the novel's cliConroy's boy protagonists, while preco- of a child's perspective...

...As they the book is the trenchant skepticism of an having once upon a time written a book a ascended together into the blue beyond exceedingly intelligent young person con- lot of people love...

...A sweeping, insightful biogradetached, almost amoral perspective that Following Claude Rawlings around from phy that sheds light on the held out to readers the persistent illusion the dingy apartment he shares with his personal and ecclesical sides of breaking through adult sentimentality taxi-driver mother to the music store of a man who brought moderto see life as it "really" was...

...And so on...

...honesty...

...People aren't there to teach Frank sagizing, its sprawling all-inclusivenss, its alism glowed on both of these small, anything he wants to learn...

...occupations, his goals-he moves on, as nightclub...

...Mr...

...They are func- rising curve toward enlightenment...

...There's the eccentric but artistic devotion...

...Dividing the boy's world lies a deep romanticism about creative geneatly between mentors and antagonists, nius and the nobility of art...

...Conroy has called it, "a book [not] about me but about the world...

...Slack where Stop-Time FIRST FA experience rather than judged it, setting was taut, stale where Stop-Time was MODERN k POPE forth episodes of boyhood-the thrill of startlingly fresh, Body & Soul rarely apPETER HEEBLETMWA[Tt scavenging an abandoned building with a proaches the brilliance of its shimmering best friend, the brutal beating of a help- progenitor...