Nude Giants in Fun City
FLEMING, THOMAS J.
Nude Giants in Fun City BIG AS LIFE By E. L. Doctorow Simon & Schuster. 218 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by THOMAS J. FLEMING Author, "King of the Hill," and other novels Dear Mayor Lindsay: You got...
...Welcome to Hard Times, took the cliché-weary idea of an evil man arriving in a small Western town, and breathed new, if horrible, life into it...
...Maybe Mr...
...The chapter in which the scientist in charge of NYCRAD research explains the giants to Creighton...
...Doctorow is not a realist...
...I'll tell you what happens and let you decide...
...He even takes his 2,000-foot giants seriously...
...No, Mayor, I don't think you can use the book to scare any extra dough out of Rocky or Lyndon...
...There is Red Bloom, a jazz musician (bass), his girl Sugarbush, an Indiana redhead with "high hard wide behind," and Wallace Creighton, a Columbia University historian who has long since given up sex for "the simple pleasures of the palate and the bowel...
...These three meet while Red and Sugar are doing some carefree looting in the diamond marts of 47th Street...
...If he decided to step on Manhattan, he would telegraph the move a year or two ahead...
...A few lines later, Creighton declares: "Some good will come of all this...
...Whew...
...There is a mad rush to the suburbs, the Catskills, even...
...To satisfy the military, the scientists have concocted 17 different ways to destroy them, and even Creighton is sighing: "The longer we endure them, the heavier they weigh on our hearts...
...Naturally, the town flips when the burghers glimpse this awesome twosome looming over the Battery...
...Doctorow's schtick, you see, is taking his characters seriously...
...The best part of the book...
...General Rockelmayer leads a brigade of howling fanatics in an armed assault on NYCRAD...
...When you get down to it, this is just an old-fashioned sciencefiction story masquerading as popart masquerading as (shudder) a serious novel...
...But the Big Town finally loses its cool...
...Everyone tries to adopt a "so what's new...
...Red organizes a clandestine jazz combo which plays by day for a Salvation Army-type organization-the only kind of music permitted in the city by the NYCRAD bureaucrats...
...And when they part at the end of the first frantic day, Red chirps "You'll stay in touch, won't you Wallace...
...But can his readers...
...Meanwhile, the giants just stand there, and fun city settles down a little...
...Only a few characters stay around to give Mr...
...From there they get involved with retired General Rockelmayer, who in his senility lusts after Sugar and incidentally welcomes the giants as a last chance for him to serve his beloved Republic...
...Doctorow a chance to present them -and his message...
...Doctorow has purposely aimed at banality, as part of the genre...
...Reviewed by THOMAS J. FLEMING Author, "King of the Hill," and other novels Dear Mayor Lindsay: You got troubles...
...Thus has the threat of instant destruction created a deeper appreciation of life's basic values in jaded Gotham...
...They aren't dangerous because they live on giant time...
...Above all he takes his ideas seriously...
...Religious types decide the giants are destroying the faith of the world...
...His "OW" lasts four months...
...How would you like to arrive at City Hall some morning this summer and (gasp) find two nude giants one male, one female, both approximately 2,000 feet tall, standing somnolently in the lower harbor...
...He also takes Sugar down to City Hall, marries her and gets her pregnant...
...More of the same destroy Red's jazz joint, and belabor him and his musicians...
...But don't worry...
...attitude, even nicknaming them (surprise) Tarzan and Jane...
...His first novel...
...If so, he has achieved it handsomely...
...This time he makes use of what his jacket-copy writer calls "a classic convention of our popular culture-a great city visited by some monstrous, biologically unprecedented menace...
...The reactions of these characters to their situation, their dialogue, is pure Batmanese...
...I'm beginning to realize that I don't know you...
...This is what E. L. Doctorow is wishing on fun city in his new novel...
...As we fade, things are looking grim for Tarzan and Jane...
...In fact, if he keeps it up, he may become the philosopher of pop...
...Creighton becomes historian of NYCRAD, a swarm of scientists, soldiers and public officials who take over the town both to defend it and to study the cloudcapped visitors...
...They cannot be a function of energy, of mass of motion as we conceive of them...
...Red assures Creighton: "You could be the greatest general in the world if you wanted to...
...In passionate technologese the scientist orates: "Their existence supersedes our understanding...
...It takes the male 12 months to raise his hand to his head, and rub the cut made by a jet that whacked into him on the first day...
...You know what," Sugar says to Red...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
