Living With Books:
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Three Novels Touch on the Problem Of Rootlessness in Modern Society By Granville Hicks AS I HAVE pointed out from time to time in these pages, each publishing season brings its...
...Basso handles Anson's mission skilfully, but it serves chiefly as a device for getting Anson back to the scenes of his youth...
...If the stories do hang together after a fashion, that is because of Miss Powell's wit...
...The hero's roots, to be sure, are in the suburb in which he lives, not in the city in which he works, but they are real and important just the same...
...Indeed, in the short story "Seventy Thousand Dollars," published in 1949, on which this part of the novel is based, the hero decides to overcome his wife's scruples and take the money with thanks...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS Three Novels Touch on the Problem Of Rootlessness in Modern Society By Granville Hicks AS I HAVE pointed out from time to time in these pages, each publishing season brings its quota of novels that I enjoy reading...
...Take, for instance, Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50), a loosely organized but amusing account of some bizarre New Yorkers...
...The first temptation—to give in to the uncle to whom he owes his job—is not too hard for a man of his character to resist, though Roger is no more eager than the next one to find himself jobless...
...Edward Newhouse's The Temptation of Roger Heriott (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00) shows what kind of roots a New Yorker can have...
...To be a good man, one must understand and resist the temptations from within...
...But Anson Page is acutely aware of the rootlessness of most New Yorkers, because he grew up in a small Southern city in which everybody knew everybody else and ancestor worship flourished...
...In the novel, the resolution is different, for the temptation is withdrawn before the decisive moment, but at the time of its withdrawal Roger learns some unpleasant truths about himself...
...His observations and reflections as he moves about the contemporary Pompey's Head lead naturally into a series of reminiscences, so that his story emerges more and more clearly and our understanding of the city goes deeper and deeper...
...Long a careful observer of rootless New Yorkers, especially Greenwich Villagers, she pins her specimens to her paper with phrases that are sometimes savage, sometimes elegant, and almost always memorable...
...The novel ends with a phony romantic episode, one that may have been introduced because subscribers to the Literary Guild would have been disappointed if the hero hadn't got into bed with somebody or other...
...I wonder whether Newhouse wasn't inspired to write the novel because he was dissatisfied with the ending of the short story...
...In the novel as in the story, the father-in-law turns out to be a likable person, and his motives are of the best...
...There is an implausibly romantic couple, and other colorful characters, more or less sardonically presented...
...One of the things Newhouse does very well is to show the domestic life of a suburbanite—the problems of transportation, the problems of keeping up the mortgaged house, the problems of the children's education, the problem of the wife's isolation without a car, and especially the problem of stretching time and money far enough to meet the other problems...
...The second temptation—to accept money from his father-in-law in spite of his wife's objections—¦ is not so easily disposed of...
...But, as Roger discovers in the novel, these circumstances cannot justify his greediness...
...She has fun with the Julien, which sounds a lot like the old Lafayette, but the device remains a manifest device...
...There are three artists, one of them supposedly dead, and there are some hangers-on, savagely portrayed, of the art world...
...but by then we know Pompey's Head, and that is what matters...
...There is a rich, middle-aged woman with a talent for making trouble for other people, and there is her young prot?g?e, who makes trouble chiefly for herself...
...And Roger is, or is trying to be, a good man...
...The most rewarding novel I have encountered this autumn is Wright Morris's The Huge Season (reviewed in The New Leader, October 4), but this is not the only interesting novel I have read...
...He is a prosperous young lawyer with a wife and two children...
...Miss Powell holds her not very closely related stories together by the device of making all the characters habitu?s or at least occasional patrons of the Cafe Julien —the "wicked pavilion" of the title...
...The wife's objections cannot be rationally defended...
...The hero of Hamilton Basso's The View from Pompey's Head (Doubleday, $3.95) is not one of the lost souls to be encountered at the Cafe Julien...
...Perhaps because he does have roots, Roger meets his temptations with a high degree of integrity...
...He returns to Pompey's Head on business, a rather dramatic business involving a famous author and a dark scandal...
...To make a good man credible is perhaps the hardest job a writer of fiction ever tackles, and Newhouse has done wonderfully well with it...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 44
