Straight Scotch

...Sharp's structural skills are part Joycean, part whimsical sand-castle architect...

...They work at parochial, obvious levels, but they work, and their lack of pretense saves them in a novel that does not reach for Joycean heights...

...Harry Gibbon's great-uncle Robert Gibbon...

...Alan Sharp writes fiction first, and satire, derivation, protest or whatever, second...

...John Moseby, most autobiographical (and therefore most reflective) of the three men, is about 25, has left IBM for study in Glasgow, and has grown dissatisfied with his bourgeois wife Edna, one of the only stereotypes imported from Donleavy...

...Moseby, himself sliding into adultery, pursues with his thoughts: "Oh Moseby, be careful...

...Perhaps a dozen "black humor" novels are around now emblazoned with the tribute, scared up one way or another, "Funniest novel since Catch 22...

...sit still...

...preacher-cocksman, wandered, and his family would ask him "why he was going, [and] he'd just say, 'If you don't go, you can't come back.' " But Harry's forbears would say, "That's silly...

...Reviewed by Michael Janeway As literary fashions take hold, a novel toying with, or worse, exploiting popular influences and modes tends to be judged more by its relationship to the chic category than by the use it makes of its parental influences...

...Ruth Cuffee's book is "Birds in the Wilderness," and she is that, but the wilderness is both a brutish Hobbesian jungle and a familiar haunt for her...

...In any event, Sharp has earned his transgressions and his lapses are too slight to press charges...

...If at the end the four characters' experiences seem squandered and the doves less likely than ever to appear (this is the first of a projected trilogy) Sharp has still succeeded in communicating-without the rancor, bombast or Oedipal ritual of similar fiction-the limits of drive and fear, adventure and static continuum in the world of the young...

...Gibbon is a Candide trying to find out what he wants, and the relative costs of what he fears he wants (homosexuality) and knows he wants (sexuality...

...Sardonic and involved, each has a self-control that floats subtly and ambiguously in and out of relation with external circumstance...

...The parallels and prisms here are not that masterfully juggled, nor are the jokes (Cuffee to his sister: "Many a true word spoken incest") that funny...

...Thus we have a first novel in which the author does not demand that we focus on him, but spreads himself through four people who are themselves complete and intriguing...

...In Ulysses, thematic parallels construct many prisms full of meaning and joke...

...There are only rare lapses of voice, though some British reviews found fault with Sharp's penchant for contriving image-glutted new words, a la Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins...

...many I thought were contrived are colloquial Scottish, blinter for example...

...Wait for the peace to descend, the down dove of calm to come...

...For all the Scottishness, though, for all that Sharp exploits the opportunities of up-country environment so familiar in the Alan Sillitoe-John Braine-David Storey working-class novels-Cuffee is no mere swaggering primitive, nor Gibbon merely a hick...

...Peter Cuffee, the same age, in art school in Manchester, wild man, existential-nihilist-fascist (he thinks), and sexual explorer is the second young man...

...Here, while none of Sharp's characters can handle relationships with older people honestly or well-and are in almost as much trouble with each other-there is no resort to the simplified tones of the belligerent, totally alienated young...

...and Gibbon, the "Albertine" Candide, who mayor may not have found his rescuer in Ruth after attractions both to John and Peter...

...All four characters focus in and out of that proposition and variants of it throughout the novel, and the motion-in time and space-is creative...

...Sharp not only restrains his use of Joycean and Donleavian voices, he avoids the overdone obfuscation for ambiguity's sake of books like Thomas Pynchon's otherwise admirable V. He also avoids the narcism inherent in the contrived, endlessly repeated futilitarian jokes of the "black humor" genre...

...Some limits are extreme in their anarchic force, like the Cuffees' incest, others narrow, like Moseby's tedious Glasgow existence...

...So when a novel as derivative as A Green Tree in Gedde comes along, one hesitates to begin with the derivations-not because comparisons to James Joyce or J. P. Donleavy will put off non-aficionados, but because Alan Sharp has made such creative use of these influences, and others, that he deserves some singling out...

...Sit quiet...

...Sharp's is the style of an older man fused with the concerns and enthusiasms of a younger man...

...The difference, I think, is basic: You can make of Catch 22 a lot of things, but not precisely a novel...

...It remains to be said that A Green Tree in Gedde is artfully and often lyrically written...

...Ruth Cuffee, wild-man Peter's sister, is juxtaposed, with shifting pain and ease, between her brother's depravity and Gibbon's innocence, but thinks (though rarely acts) for herself as well...

...all are plausibly drawn...

...as if the Gabriel Fielding of In the Time ot Greenbloom or the L. P. Hartley of The Go-Between had taught J. P. Donleavy the craft of fiction...

...sit still, the more you move the more the world trembles...

...but he is, and he does...

...That is perhaps the only exhortatory moment in the novel...

...Sharp's characters are not careful, nor do they sit still...

...Too much of what is written today by and about the young is constricted by shrill, too-cool tones in the efforts to capture the cool-shrill world of the tuned-up young...

...Two-thirds of the way through the novel, Moseby, up on a hill in Glasgow, runs into his don, and the don, squalid in his concealment of an affair, breaks and runs to meet his mistress...

...Down in Demerara" (an old name for British Guiana) is Peter Cuffee's and Harry Gibbon's book: Cuffee, the explorer, his sister's lover, violator of taboos...

...His experiences however, form the basis for three distinctly different, equally absorbing central male characters, and his imagination provides a fourth major character, a sister of one of the boys...

...Be careful Moseby, oh take care...

...A Green Tree in Gedde is autobiographical...

...If he didn't go, he wouldn't have to come back...

...John Moseby, the married student, sits in Greenock near Glasgow, yet moves in his own struggles as far as the others, and with less histrionics...

...He begins by linking nonconsecutive chapters under subtitles which, as with Ulysses' chapter-heads, are not so much explanations as blends of riddle and answer...

...Moseby's long-time chum Harry Gibbon, an ironic but lost Candide, is the third...

...Typically, a tone of joking sarcasm-"Big kind a cynical guy" is the form for attack on a verbally exposed flank-deflates the drama of their confrontations, but not their effect upon each other...

...The subtitles follow the verse of a seashanty: Here we sit/Birds in the wilderness/Down in Demerara...

...Cuffee and Gibbon, who knew each other in the Army, come bouncing out of the North bound for London and Europe, Cuffee with a provincial's sense of hunting and survival in any jungle, Gibbon with a provincial's yearnings and innocence...

...Frictive," "greensieved," "lopsily" are examples...

...Sharp grew up in the West of Scotland, where lurks a "preoccupation with guilt and sex and sin," served in the British Army, worked respectably for IBM in young married life, and bummed around...