Firecrackers Without Synthesis:

...I mean novels in which a protagonist is forced into contemplation and definition of himself, of life, and of the world not during his teens or college years but at 25 or 30 or even later...

...or it may, more probably, reflect the fact that in an affluent society, with jobs and cars and girls and deep freezes stretched seductively just beyond Commencement exercises, young men are prone to put off consideration of such tedious matters until, often, it is too late to do anything about them...

...Not that some of that humor is not beautifully funny, and some of that seriousness beautifully perceptive...

...Contributor, "'Atlantic," "Esquire" This novel, winner of the 1961 Harper Prize, is a rather wild affair, possibly not destined to leave an agreeable aftertaste on all kinds of palates...

...Nor is this irrelevant as a central criticism of the book, for Alonso's wisdom is clearly supposed to be at least half of its message, the other half being sexual...

...This tendency may reflect an increased complexity in our world, a need not for one self-definition but for several in a lifetime...

...In each book, the author had a load left over that he couldn't fit into the action—some social polemics here, in Faulkner a lot of commentary and interpretation —and in each book, as a burro to carry that load, he fabricated a "crazy" character with special powers...

...the trouble here is that Alonso is so crazy that we can't accept his wisdom...

...That three distinguished judges—Saul Bellow, John K. Hutchens and Jean Stafford—liked its savor is not to be questioned, for they awarded its author $10,000 against what must have been a stiffish horde of competitors...

...There is a difference between moods that alternate with and relieve each other, and moods that war...

...Thus cleansed and endowed with sufficient meaningfulness to cancel his original dark design, Vangel sets off homeward, apparently in order to teach his unfaithful wife Spanish-style love and to continue Alonso'« crusade for a perfect world of reasonable men...

...Taken, even, all in all, the book contains such a cargo of these brilliances as to make clear why it won a great prize, and one closes it with the certainty that he has dwelt for a time with a first-rate talent...

...One keeps wishing as he reads, however, in the interests of homogeneity and force, that the book would make up its mind just which tone it is going to let win...

...At any rate, the title-hero of Vangel Griffin is a 29-year-old lawyer, married, a neutrally nice sort of guy who is smitten with a sudden and belated doubt that all this means very much—such a doubt indeed that he resolves to allow himself one year for searching, and then to kill himself if life hasn't accumulated some meaning...

...Surrounding the stages of Vangel's involvement with these two is the political atmosphere that led to the recent and noted student riots in Madrid, with a number of minor characters to represent the shadings of that atmosphere...

...it lacks Stephen Dedalus' harmonitas almost entirely...

...He can draw a face like a painter, can give the whole feel of a person sometimes with a short vivid paragraph and a line or so of dialogue, and can present sharp unsentimental vignettes of metropolitan Spanish life that utterly shame the slick and covertly romantic observations about that country, by outsiders, that usually pass for profound...

...Thereafter, in a series of incidents with the approximate irregularly explosive sequence of a lit package of firecrackers, we watch him involve himself sexually and emotionally with a discontented female offshoot of the Spanish upper class named Satry, and intellectually and emotionally with her bearded brother Alonso, who makes speeches on the streets toward a more perfect world, gives away pearls and money, reasons in the exact manner of a latter-day Don Quixote, and even has a fairly exact latter-day Sancho Panza to take care of him and to serve as the rock against which he strikes his wilder sparks...

...But can one take Alonso's nobility seriously, as one badly needs to, if it is made loud fun of three pages later...

...He is also the only character with any real nobility or stature, for Vangel, though focal, is a kind of sponge or tab'la rasa, and Satry (the bestdrawn of all) wallows consciously in the opposite of the purity she believes in...

...Taken separately as Quixotesque episodes, a number of the incidents involving Alonso—his attempt to interrupt the Cardinal's Christmas sermon, his paranoid assault on a Teutonic art-historian in the Prado, and others—constitute some of the stoutest belly-humor I've run against in a long while...

...In a fast two pages we come this far with him, and on page 3 we are in Spain where, sans wife or other attachments, he has enrolled at the University...

...Such a semi-satirical summary of the book's action works, of course, on the assumption that the book is trying to be realistic, and is therefore a little unfair, for much of the time Vangel Griffin makes no pretense at realism...

...The book carries, for instance, a good deal of inpointed irony, and often, when it gets into special danger of being over-serious, is likely to turn one of its firecrackers into a rocket of humorous expressionistic fantasy, nearly always with bearded Alonso as the passenger...

...Taken separately as descriptions and insights and characterizations, many of Lobsenz's serious passages are superb...

...One wonders whether, for instance, if Simon Dedalus had owned a Cadillac franchise, young Stephen would have burned with quite so clear and blue a flame...

...Vangel learns about women from Satry, and about his duty to mankind from Alonso, and is spared the possible consequences of his involvement with so stormy a pair when Alonso beheads Satry with an ancestral sword and gets his own brains blown out in the riots, though a symbolic fragment of them flies into Vangel's open mouth...

...But I found this character pervasively annoying in much the same way that I have always found Darl Bundren annoying in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying...

...Unhinged," I think, might be the best word to describe the relationship between this book's humor, which is most often satirical, and its seriousness, which is most often polemical...

...The trouble in As I Lay Dying is that Darl Bundren is so perceptive that we can't accept his insanity...

...One wonders, though, how much more real power the brilliances might have attained if they had had a better synthesis, been welded together into a better whole...

...The book belongs to that special American variation on the novel of adolescence of which we have had a good many examples in the past few years, whether gray-flannel in texture or otherwise...