A Discordant Unity

...Wheelchairs are unfolded, thermoses of hot punch are distributed, and hundreds of the stricken roll off into the forest for a day...

...the mountain of lollypops that has to be covered with a tarpaulin when it rains...

...His tone is one of insufferable arrogance, a flesh-creeping medley of intelligence and pain: "It's a beetling irony that I should have power among such people as my father, Denise, Little Ed and Big Ed, but as it is the irony of the situation which bestows the power, it has the effect of making me just...

...Little Ed, musing from his lifeguard's tower...

...This one is narrated by the polio-victim, the boy next door, Wally, who has now grown up and married the girl Little Ed used to sleep with...

...6." After nine excruciating holes, the foresome leaves the golf course for the batting-range, where Little Ed faces a mechanical pitcher known as Iron Mike...

...It approaches the reader by a series of discrepant labels, seven of them, applied to itself...

...So that we can see how embedded Newman's wisdom is in his situational foolishness...

...turn the page, and where the title-list of the "stories" occurs you will find another over-all docket: "Atonalities," insisting, then, that these texts are not only various, but that they do not even come under the congruence of a single "key...

...What is finally done is done without katharsis, in painful leisure, unspinozistic as Luther on the privy...

...Each of the 10 "stories" has its rewards, though the golf course is my favorite, summarizing as it does the land-locked impulsiveness of our bourgeois ethic-and New Axis altogether indicates not only an achieved response to American experience, but a mastery of that experience...

...Old Dr...

...The contraption goes wild and beans Little Ed, knocking him out, while Wally falls out of his chair in shock...

...the next page offers a further adumbration of the book's possibilities in an aphorism by Hermann Broch: "We are a we, not because we hold communion, but because our contours overlap," which already indicates something-something difficult-about the work's compositional principles...

...Fourth conies yet another quotation, from Jacques Rivière: "Sincerity is a subtle hunt which pursues only silences"-by which we know the going is not going to be easy, or at any rate not explicit...

...then the notion of fiction at all is rather scotched, for Newman calls his book "An Exhibition,' and we begin to look for something exemplary about it...

...First comes the alternative title: "or the Little Ed Stories," which misleadingly suggests that we face a series of fictions setting forth the world of a single character...

...Weaver on America...

...Newman's exploitation of what McLuhan calls a mosaic or field approach to the problem of fictional form, if it bewilders us by its demands on our capacities to relate apparent dissimilarities, enables him to cover a great deal of ground: three generations of American suburbia, its cause ("a past so void of error, so determined by the present, that in any conventional sense, it did not exist"), ruling condition ("the commuter's sense of helplessness, the inability to justify the passage by either end of the journey"), and cure ("having no more to give up, I had to fall back on myself completely...

...one wants merely to love it as much as its terrible honor will allow...

...Weaver, neither old nor Doctor but simply called that...

...then one more effort to set us on the right track: "ten voices of authority"-one wonders, at this, just who will be doing the speaking, and who will win out, with so many utterances to be accounted for...

...5, Ed Jr...

...He knew the girl was not a real girl, not because of the strange colors, but because all of the lines met When you see a girl, all the lines don't meet and you don't know anything...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" This lyrical, secretive book finds its imaginative unity in a clutch of disproportions-of style, structure, theme, tone, even figures of speech: nothing matches-each one pushing the other back into the shape they all make together...

...She stood there for some time, ready for anything, the sourceless light beating about her...

...Each of these "atonalities" is organized around an image-"the spotty defense of the educated"which intensifies to an epiphany...

...It is the heritage of our forefathers, who confused consanguinity with justice, which allows me some authority to play announcer to their athletics.' Then follows an account, by the nemesic Wally, of nine holes of golf, with all the tensions among Denise (wheeling him up and down the bunkers) and Little Ed (just back from medical school) and the two terrible fathers neatly recorded, at the end of each merciless trajectory ("The initial shots reacted to set patterns, although Ed's habitual fault was transformed to advantage on this occasion, for as it faded the ball cleared the treetops at the dogleg and rolled within nice pitching distance...

...Wally on the war between the generations...

...when, for example, our young mother ("Nora could not go anywhere-she was good at being there") washes the remains of a bird off her picture window in the dead of winter, she is faced, at the sunny end of a day of ordinary victories and defeats, with a manifestation of all the divinity Newman can afford: "Nora returned to the living room to get things ready for Ed...

...The uncertainty as indulged here is one more evidence of the genre's life, as is the apparently endless crisis of the form itself: All we really know about the novel as a genre is that it is the one kind of literature that is, always dying...

...the brick walk built through the Preserve (the scene is a real estate development created by Big Ed, who has "what every man desires: a power commensurate with his taste") so that Little Ed's friend Wally, a polio victim, can wheel his chair into an analogue of wilderness: "Since then, every warm weekend, busses, trucks, ambulances, station wagons come to the Preserve...

...But generally these images are neutral in tone, made incandescent only by their overpowering effect on member's of the book's central family: Big Ed D, Nora D, Little Ed D, and their friends, lovers and mentors ("Old Dr...

...But then, so are we...

...What Newman says of Big Ed should henceforth be true of himself among us: "He was a spokesman in a community of listeners...

...Indeed, the quality of life that is being "exhibited" is often subservient to the insights we associate, however clumsily, with Kafka, though the menacing Eros of these chapters is, by now, a native strain in every sense of that word...

...The penultimate scene, from which my last aphorism comes, is so grotesque and heartbreaking that I cannot resist accounting for it a little, though it is scarcely fair to the ordinance of the book as a whole (New Axis is not the kind of book one wants to be fair to...

...in a laconic scoring that tells all: "Father 5, Ed Sr...

...consider this little chaplet of aphorisms: "When you're a stranger your story is what you've let happen to yourself...

...The 10 pieces of the text, which are sufficiently speculative to accommodate such evidences of mind as these, are also extraordinarily wedded to the life of the bourgeois body-like all acts of the imagination, this novel is a marriage of the given to the calculated-and it is a gritty task to account for the movement of narrative through each...

...and the initial K turns up suspiciously often: in King's Kove, the development where the D's live, in Kaddy Karts and Hair Kutter Kits, all the affluent paraphernalia of middle-class madness...

...Big Ed on seeing a satellite...

...Sometimes he was overwhelmed by the magnanimity of his society which protected men so firmly from their dreams, which absorbed so much individual failure without a larger cataclysm...

...Nature abhors a vacuum because it is one...

...Some of these images are alarming-the walking sprinkler that attacks a house and floods the cellar when it cannot advance through the wall...

...Little Ed at eight, looking at a calendar...

...Yet he fouled the short iron, three-putting as well...

...the ultimate determination of the book's locus occurs on the next page: three paragraphs of emblematic prose ("in the smoke of compost, personae of noble savage dance wildly for the child . . the myth passed intact, the astonishment that the experience can be equal to it") defining the perspective of ruined primitivism ("there was no enemy") down which we are to draw a bead on "New Axis," a middle American city...

...Denise pulls him back, and while Little Ed comes to and bandages himself up, thus becoming his own first patient, Wally muses on his role as interpreter: "I do not know quite how to put the rest to you-I only know that I am tolerated so long as I do not get allegorical, so I cannot tell you if he tried to dodge...

...Then, she folded her arms, and squinting against the opaque ice-glare, pondered the probabilities of washing windows in the winter...

...It is no accident that Newman, for all his brand-name naturalism, uses the Kafkalike initial as enough for his characters to go on: Nora starts off the book by reading-and quoting, though reluctantly: "thinking about two things at once always gave her the creeps"-The Great Wall of China, that wonderful enactment of futility...

...Beyond effectiveness and revolted by power he wished only to register, forever, his resentment...

...Surely this is Newman cheering himself on as an artist] I realized then, there on the ground outside the cage with our two fathers, that there was no conspiracy, and further, that because there was none, there could be no revenge either " And at this point in the "atonality" there occurs that last aphorism about the finality of existence, the irreversibility of experience...

...Only after this series of focussing nudges does the book actually begin, betraying the author's uncertainty which is also our own whenever we think axiologically about the novel...

...She pulled the drapes and fell back blind...