Affairs of State

...Set outside of Salzburg in an ancient Austrian Schloss, this book is an intelligent, tightly woven attempt to write a symbolic or perhaps allegorical novel of intellectual and international interchange, but though literature and the arena of ideas are supposed to be the setting, most of the novel takes place in bars and bedrooms...

...Ultimately, in spite of its many virtues, this shortcoming destroys the novel's believability and compromises its importance...

...This same dehumanization also applies to the men (not so much seducers as seduced): the British writer living it up with a French girl on American funds...

...It dehumanized them, made them, in turn, vaguely symbolic, twentieth century Mesdames de Maintenon without boudoir or office...

...Is this to be Volk's final conclusion—and the author's and the reader's as well— that there is...

...Siegfried Volk, the protagonist, and a famous American critic and teacher, comes to the Institute to lecture...

...A rapid series of incidents ensue which involve Volk in various lives and which seem intended to show Volk's growth of character and change of viewpoint: a stolen Italian passport, a murder or suicide (which, is never clearly established), an embezzlement of the Institute's funds, etc...

...Volk also has a series of dreams which are supposed to show why he is what he is (a strong, honorable father, an intense sibling rivalry with his brother), and which are also to give some notion of what he will become...

...Most important, Vivienne Koch, with all her talents, has committed that sin against her own characters of which she writes, in another context, "the cruelty of making abstractions out of living, concrete entities...

...If the characters succumb to vagueness out of stereotyping, the plot grows vague out of an implied importance which never becomes clear and a symbolic weight which never takes on validity...

...Volk's name, too, is apparently symbolic—both the Siegfried (the knight) and the Volk (people)—as his slip on the ice, his dreams, and many other incidents are calculated to be...

...The sentry put the rifle between his knees...

...Not that these may not be appropriate places for intellectual and intercultural exchange, but the author's emphasis is somewhat different, and neither allegory nor characters is, therefore, sharply delineated...

...Fresh from a divorce and a subsequent affair, he slips on the ice and breaks his arm, which makes him almost, but not quite, unable to enjoy the myriad sexual opportunities around him...

...He bemoans the fact that "with his arm in a sling," he has become a father-confessor to his students and colleagues alike, "A vast, Dali-esque, cloacal ear...

...Reviewed by Abraham Rothberg Editor, "Anatomy of a Moral: The Political Essays of Djilas" A new theme of not-so-innocent Americans abroad is proliferating in postwar American letters, an increasing part of which is devoted to those who go to foreign countries on fellowships, scholarships and exchange teacherships...

...and the pneumatic, obliging French student (but of course...

...But the political talk of Senator Joseph McCarthy and of the death of Joseph Stalin seem to come from the very distant past (much further than 1953), and echo tinnily...

...There is some emphasis on Volk's being—with his broken arm—the Henry Jamesian "trapped spectator," but Volk is intellectual fountainhead, administrative counsellor, conspirator and even lovemaker, so that if he is "trapped," it is not altogether as a "spectator" but as a participant, and he seems little changed by either his observations or his participations...

...aging voluptuaries, lovers of Eros, adventuresses without portfolio...

...the corrupt Austrian who knows his way around, who has survived the Nazis, the holocaust of World War II and its aftermath, and has embraced the materialist manipulation of physical comfort that goes by the name of Wirtschaftswunder...

...He began to wave with both hands...

...in spite of differing backgrounds and political systems, some '"people-to-people" communication...

...There is a good deal of intelligence, sophistication and knowledgeability in this well-written novel, even— with apologies to Miss Koch—a kind of engaging masculine tough-minded-ness about politics and practicality about matters sexual...

...And that is just what happens: The characters become vaguely symbolic and dehumanized...

...He [Volk] knew the parallel was cruel...

...And is this what makes the Institute of American Studies worthwhile and the experience of the novel meaningful...

...All the women in the novel, in fact, turn out to be (in Miss Koch's words...

...He raised his arm over his head...

...If Volk has a change of life, or a change of love (the novel's title), it is never concretely rendered...

...Vivienne Koch's Change of Love undertakes to explore this theme in an Institute of American Studies which is designed to give an international group of graduate students and teachers a mature appraisal of American life and letters...

...the neurotic American intellectual woman (a seductress too...

...The most puzzling in this regard is the final scene in which Volk is leaving and sees a Russian sentry from his train window...

...the buxom Yugoslav wife of a Titoist general (also a seductress...

...He waves and the sentry waves back...

...the Southern American Baptist of wild religious frenzy who is a repressed homosexual and cries out to be beaten with knotted ropes...

...etc., etc...

...The one exception to this, and the most interesting of the women characters, a Cora Brewster, who has "bummed around Europe since [nineteen] forty-one," leaves the book early on, too early on, and appears briefly and perhaps too symbolically as a Cassandra...

...The characters tend to deteriorate into national stereotypes: the decolletage Italian seductress...

...He was still waving when the train lurched around a curve, his image ripped from the window...

...If anything, most of the novel seemed devoted to demonstrating the contrary, that there was very little "people-to-people" or "person-to-person" communication, whatever the background of those concerned, except for sexual communion...

...the drunken Irish poet, vulgar and lyrical, playing his clairseagh...