The Depression Blues

...It is obvious that Rip, too, loves Mary, despite his devotion to his brother...

...And his trick of "double" verbs—"sorrow-eyed," "rigid-eyed," "Greta-Garbo'd"—is more annoying than fresh...

...He has no illusion of himself to maintain, as does Paul...

...The period in which the book is set seems far more authentic than its people, too many of whom talk the same way—as if mechanized...

...But he fails and Paul stops writing rather than risk again the agony of self-knowledge to which loving Mary had fleetingly exposed him...

...But Rip's experiences as he roams the country, seeming to seek himself as well as his brother, do not destroy him...

...When the boys are beyond adolescence, their father Steve walks out on the family...

...When at a party someone says, "Beware of bitches bearing breasts," it has the ring of clever advertising—and not good writing...

...In fact, he arranges to have Mary serve as their post office, hoping through this ruse to bring Paul back to her, and to himself...

...The private depression created by watching the deterioration of their father—and the image they had had of him—swells for Paul and Rip Gomery the general depression that overwhelms the country...

...At the begining, the brothers keep in touch through letters and Rip tries to persuade Paul to return to Mary...

...That may be the crux of the matter—the distance without the loss of feeling that an author must traverse from his original vision before it breathes, regardless of the age or period with which he is dealing...

...she seems like a prop upon which to hang the brothers' stories...

...Their mutual feeling that Paul may be forever lost, not only to them but to himself, is too glib, contriving as it does to set the stage for their future together...

...Saying "the tongue-fat" fire and "tongue-fat" something else, and using "greened" and other similar words as verbs, clutters rather than clarifies the writing...

...And these fail in spite of the fact the nub of the matter is important...

...When their mother dies, leaving her husband a legacy of $2, one dollar for buying a last meal and the remaining one for a rope "to hang yourself," Paul and Rip are free to follow their paths, to get jobs that do not fulfill them and to dream of a better life in the crumbling world around them...

...His sense of reality allows him to absorb them, if not always joyously...

...Moreover, the hard-boiled lingo does not manage to hide the sentimentality and the vagueness of the characterization...

...Somehow the idea kept pursuing me that the author had not only written this book long ago, but when he had not yet had sufficient distance in his imagination between himself and what he wrote...

...Her precipitous shift—via their correspondence—of devotion from Paul to Rip is out of character...

...Rip is the first of the two to take to the road, and after breaking with Mary Paul becomes a wanderer, too...

...Rather than risk Mary's discovering that he is not the American movie-dream of perfect manhood, he loses what that love had promised: his beginning to be a whole man...

...Paul, unable to accept himself, cannot face the world that he discovers and increasingly blurs it through multiple forms of escape: from loveless sex, that leaves him feeling degraded, to alcohol and then to narcotics...

...Weak rather than mean, Steve is unable to endure any longer the gloomy home and role of nurse he has had to play in the years since his wife was invalided by polio...

...Since All The Naked Heroes must be judged as a whole, the novel somehow lacks cohesion, its time and places more alive than the people...

...On the whole the novel's style gets between it and the reader...

...Contributor, "Kenron Review" SOMEHOW All The Naked Heroes seems dated, which means—for me—that it doesn't come off, since a successful novel is not dependent upon dates, even if not timeless...

...The framework—logical enough, that to live fully, one must accept being human—is too bare to properly house this thought...

...Alan Kapelner's novel of the '30s, about two brothers caught in the Depression, suffering from a disrupted home and living in a period that anticipates World War II, seems more like an impassioned and diffused verbal travelogue about the "skid-roads" of the U.S.—and the wandering "beats," Depression vintage—than a story of the Gomery brothers...

...Not only is Mary's easy conversion to a new love suspect, but so is Rip's facile acceptance of an affection that so recently belonged to the brother to whom he is so devoted...

...Rip, who had at first seemed unstable, the one to leave jobs he could not abide despite having no money, ultimately chooses to accept the world in a positive way despite his awareness of its chaos...

...The nub is the tragedy that Paul, rather than share his secret, of being paralyzingly afraid of war, with Mary—the young woman with whom he has fallen in love—is willing to lose her, and thus himself...

...Mary lacks dimension...

...Kapelner shows a lack of precision under the guise of pseudo-poetry, as when he speaks of the "curvy" moon and in the next breath describes a woman as "curvy...

...At first the explosive slogans give an illusion of a free flow, but they soon grow monotonous—like entr'actes which finally become the show itself when the stars are unable to appear...