A World of Jargon

...Starting his book with a defense of the great literary form, Baumbach rises slowly to the eloquence of Frederick R. Karl: "It has become commonplace in recent years to complain that the novel as form is either dead or deathly ill, that we are living in a time relatively uncongenial to the making of literature, an age of criticism—a myth, incidentally, propagated by critics who have grown tired of reading...

...Reviewed by LAWRENCE GRAVER Williams College What, when pressed to secret confession, is your favorite critical platitude...

...The objectification of the primordial self...

...Just in case anyone is hurt by this exclusiveness, I should add that he also goes on record as loving James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Vance Bourjaily, Nelson Algren, James Jones, Carson McCullers, Herbert Gold, John Hawkes, Philip Roth, John Barth, Evan Connell, Norman Fruchter, and Michael Seide...

...Well, once again, Baumbach is your kind of critic...

...The exemplary spiritual passage from innocence to guilt to redemption...

...This thesis is not only commonplace, but is expressed in terms so crudely simple-minded that every work of fiction published between 1946-61 sounds as if it were written by Baumbach, whose first novel will not actually be published by Random House until later this year...

...In the first of a countless number of artificial strategies, Baumbach wheels out the weariest straw man in modern criticism: the complacent reviewer announcing the death of the novel...

...For all the banal horrors of our culture, the gradual deadening of our nerve of outrage, there has probably been in the past two decades as great a concentration of good American novels as in that mythic period of exile and return following the First World War...

...A World of Jargon THE LANDSCAPE OF NIGHTMARE: STUDIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVEL By Jonathan Baumbach New York University Press...

...The Landscape of Nightmare does have a thesis, which—even as a reviewer addicted to quotations —I blush to quote...

...In short, the whole method is ludicrous and self-defeating...

...Pretending that he has discovered all these novels and all those fearsome insights for himself, he rarely admits a debt to another critic...

...Although the style and swollen compassion of Landscape of Nightmare makes it read like a travesty of vanity-press dust jackets, its content is even more obviously a mindless fabrication...

...Is it "the vicarious Adam...

...In addition to being swollen and counterfeit, Baumbach's book is scandalous in still another way...

...Jack Burden and Holden Caulfield, Frank Alpine and Cass Kinsolving, Peyton Loftis and Sol Nazerman: They all endure remarkably similar torments, "from the death of sin through the purgation of guilt and suffering to the potential resurrection of redemption...

...Admitting that William Styron's Set This House on Fire is over-explicit, painfully rhetorical, and fitted with a phony ending, he still finds it "an original and serious novel which survives, if not wholly transcends, its flaws [and yet] although it has its shattering moments, it does not achieve anything like the tragic catharsis of Crime and Punishment...

...The solemnity and solipsism of Baumbach's performance are so overwhelming, I suspect his book may have a hidden purpose...

...Like an overstuffed undergraduate whose mind has collapsed after a course in myth criticism, Baumbach sees not only nightmare on his immediate landscape, but a mob of ambivalent innocents and false fathers, unwitting saints and saintselect, redeemers in spite of themselves...

...Undergoing this baptism by bromide are Bellow, Warren, Malamud, O'Connor, Salinger, Styron, Wallant, Ellison, and Morris...

...Here they are, among countless others, in their tarnished, imprecise splendor, side by side with many of Jonathan Baumbach's own inspired inventions: "The Metaphysics of Demagoguery" (a chapter heading for All the King's Men...

...Or do you, as a connoisseur of Christmas Book Lists, enjoy trading on a lunatic literary stock market in which a dozen American novelists between 27 and 50 are compared in weight, size and packaging with Melville, Dostoevsky and Kafka...

...For those of you who scan David Lawrence for epigrams and are working up to a Gary Cooper Summer Festival, here at $5.00 is The Landscape of Nightmare...

...It has something vaguely to do with the vicarious Adam's mythic quest for his father, the fallen innocent's spiritual voyage through sin, guilt and redemption, played out as some kind of corrosive morality play for "our anguished, bomb-haunted times...

...if two of the purposes of criticism are to discriminate and classify, Baumbach's unconscious role is that of the fiendish anti-critic, turning every individualized work of art into the same dreary book, running all things together in a humorless search for Significance...

...It may well be the first post-camp work of literary criticism, the first study which, from start to finish, can be read wholly for laughs...

...The Landscape of Nightmare is the fifth book in the past four years to argue for the importance of the very recent American novel, not (to quote the irresistible Baumbach) "as nightmare news reports of our culture, but as works of the imagination, as works that preserve the possibility of consciousness...

...and Baumbach has great love in his heart for all of them...

...and "the seismographic schlemiel" (the thin-skinned brother of "marginal man...

...Nowhere does he indicate that there have been hundreds of essays on these novelists published in the past decade, or even that Ihab Hassan, if no one else, has covered much the same material in a full-length study written nearly five years ago...

...As works of art...

...For those who may have forgotten, the same scarecrow is dressed in identical rags for a slightly different celebration in Karl's The Contemporary English Novel...