A Compassionate View
Walzer, Judith
TUE BEAT OF LIFE, by Barbara Probst Solomon. Lippincott & Co. 222 pp. $3.95. With sympathy and honesty, Barbara Probst Solomon has written a book about her own generation. In The Beat...
...SOLOMON HAS MADE this feeling of deprivation fully comprehensible as the result of a long chain of disconnections...
...And Tim feels crushed by a kind of historical isolation from these earlier ages which he envies pitifully...
...These young people are far too conscious that "Neither of [them] has been poor, is poor, or probably ever will be poor...
...Everything from jazz to the political enthusiasm of the '30's and the patriotism of World War II belongs to other generations...
...Natasha and Tim seem to live only destructively...
...The result of their isolation is that Natasha and Tim no longer seem to possess that desire to involve themselves with other people which forms part of what we call loneliness...
...The exciting ages all seem to be past...
...There are no accusations of apathy and aimlessness here, nor will Mrs...
...In The Beat of Life the "beat" and the "silent" young are not being ruthlessly parodied, or attacked by older intellectuals who have never shared their problems...
...They are free from family life, from parental authority, from traditions of any sort, from material want, perhaps even from moral imperatives...
...And also because the "parent" generation, especially its socialists, owes the young something more than permissiveness and the blame which always follows it...
...And Tim and Natasha have absolutely no sense of the kind of willful effort men can make in order to possess a part of the past, and to create a legitimate sense of continuity between their own experience and other people's...
...because they are genuinely bewildered...
...This attempt alone would make the novel unique, but the fact that the writer succeeds in understanding and in maintaining a compassionate tone throughout, makes it a great pleasure to read...
...because they are inexperienced at fighting even bewilderment...
...One might say that they are "free"—but only in a totally negative sense of the word...
...cated story whose purpose is to describe and understand before criticizing...
...Gone is the delight of the middle-class college graduate who escapes from a small town to Greenwich Village or to a Lower East Side slum...
...and because they fail where those who are more experienced also have failed...
...something more generous than an unseeing disgust...
...Tim admits that they are vicariously "feeding on" the sadness and the shabbiness of someone else's existence...
...they avoid getting married...
...They have left home not because they wished to find a more congenial world, but only to hide out in a more neutral one...
...The life of the poor is exotic, strange, a spectacle rather than a reality...
...The lack of a worldview (of an ideology, of a politics), dependent as it is upon their personal experience, reflects back upon that experience, eventually destroying life itself...
...But the author has subtly shown that not even their vicarious appetites are very avid...
...Natasha's suicide is an apallingly thoughtless one...
...their child is efficiently aborted...
...With sympathy and honesty, Barbara Probst Solomon has written a book about her own generation...
...Instead the conditions of that world, and what they do to two young lives, are set before us in a deliberately uncompli...
...The Puerto Rican upper, West Side is so foreign to them that they never consider participating in its life...
...It is the sort of freedom one has when the only life possible is utterly formless...
...MRS...
...Solomon's contemporaries have to listen with embarrassment as they are blamed for living badly in a rotten world...
...Why, the older radical may wonder, should we, should the author, sympathize with such fainthearted, energyless young people...
...The reasons (if one does not instinctively feel them) are all convincingly spelled out in this novel: because they try to be honest with themselves...
...and Tim's endurance of her death is mechanical...
...Timothy Lanahan and Natasha Thompson, the hero and heroine, live out their hapless love affair almost in hiding, asking nothing of a world so distant from their own concerns that it seems to demand nothing of them...
...In fact, Tim thinks that his generation can have the "good things" only by pretending, by imitating something foreign to it...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
