Subtle and Unsworn Enemies

...It was Joyce, I think, who first flailed and dissected the mind and language in order to circumvent his themes...

...Joe Allston, beyond 60, is in a position to review his life, and ruefully defeated as he may be, to look critically at the always thriving world of "little live things" in his own graden and next door...

...it is a relief to read a round, strongly constructed novel of open sensibility (not devious and oblique) after some of the up-to-date braggadocio and almost malicious virtuosity in recent works...

...They perhaps deserve only contempt...

...It may be that such people make themselves up entirely from what is available as formula or available as experiment...

...Peck's "fun and freedom" violate the first law of genuine adulthood??have care for others, have care for yourself, regard the consequences of your acts...

...Still, the sense that it is an acute and growing war, with unique contemporary features, cannot be put down...

...It is frightening, this increased abstraction in the way people live their lives...

...But this staleness is in experience really, not the mind...

...Allston relives this relationship when he engages with Jim Peck, guru on a motorcycle, who camps on Allston's land and collects his sordid community about him while preaching and practicing the hippy faith...

...A third character was needed to judge the quarrel, and she is presented in the person of Marian Catlin, the young woman who is dying of cancer and fighting death back long enough to have her baby...

...As Joe Allston says, "I felt that I could have made him up out of the ingredients available without prescription at any off-campus coffee shop...

...Ithink most readers will appreciate Stegner's novel and be moved by it, despite some of the stagy simplifications that suggest a thesis novel...

...possibly he was formed by reaction to the role assumed by Peck and by Peck's expectations...

...Jim Peck and Joe Allston know each other when they meet, subtle and unsworn enemies...

...Lively and intelligent as he is, Allston has brought his moral sensibility into the corrupt paradise of California, which as he observantly reports is a cohabiting of suburbia and orgy, orgy being the alternative to suburbia...

...Obsessed by their great responsibility as parents, neurosis-breeders by definition, and by their educated sophistication, which expresses no judgment without dangling it in second thoughts, they are crippled, inadequate monsters in the eyes of the young...

...Discussing what we might call Peck's morbid optimism...

...The issues are the old against the young, order versus disorder (Peck is described, somewhat un-convincingly, as a bearded satyr reviving the Dionysian chaos), conscience against the lust for letting-go...

...Perhaps all Peck's manifestations are an effort to make something out of nothing, desperate alternatives to rejected conventions, which ironically are themselves even thinner conventions...

...Stegner makes us feel this...

...This is a matter for specialized study and not a novelist's direct concern, though Stegner's view of the conflict succeeds in touching our sense of history...

...As the conscience of the book, he describes himself memorably: "I'm the sort of half-wit who won't take his own side in an argument for fear of sounding illiberal...

...They are as tentative as the characters in an Antonioni movie...

...What he sees around the tree-house of his young tenant is chiefly the garbage Peck drops...

...What dominates, however, is his irresponsibility, and avowed devotion to the spirit of the "love-in...

...Eventually the boy sees that the world is dangerous in spite of man's will or best intentions...

...It evokes the high artifice typical of revolutionary periods, with the compulsive struggle between narrow and brutal principles...

...Stegner is a writer of successful practice, a real old hand...

...We live in a time of revolutionary cruelty, Joe Allston's story reminds us, and with the insight of a surviving moral intelligence, he tells us some things to fear and some to regret...

...as for Jim Peck, his ridiculous innocence stands crestfallen in the contrast...

...She exists importantly in the imagination of Joe Allston, and is able to give him an affirmative education...

...Marian Catlin, because she genuinely delights in life and genuinely suffers, is a reproach to both the protagonists...

...That last word is important in evoking the moral flabbiness of the old in their battle with the young...

...Most of all we want to see and understand the world that Peck sees...

...Too many expert analysts and creed-mongers have passed their way for them to preserve the high seriousness of tragedy...

...Allston accurately observes: "The trouble with Peck he doesn't realize the world he lives in is holding itself together in desperation, with sticking plaster and patching cement and Band-Aids, and needs the support of every member...

...As Joe Allston implies, their liberalism confounds them...

...Infused with a blend of eastern wisdom and existentialist pathos, they are probably the breeding ground of the Jim Pecks...

...the cancer that kills Marian Catlin, who most deserves and yearns to live, is something that will kill everyone, and everyone's fun...

...His career was in publishing, but he seems an analogue to the Harold Kaplan, our guest Writers & Writing columnist, is a professor of English at Bennington College...

...Perhaps that is because Peck has dramatized himself to the margin of unreality...

...Among the most brutal of these simplicities are some favorite war words of our time: the "repression" slogan of the neo-Freudians, the "alienation" cry of the new Marxists...

...The opposition between Peck and Allston is neat, but it is dramatically useful, for the author arraigns them both...

...Take the direct approach to any major theme, and the cheap universals of contemporary knowledge touch it with banality...

...They can get no release from their suffering, perhaps because they are not sure they should take their suffering seriously...

...Yet we are defeated in this search, as Joe Allston is defeated...

...Allston has raised and lost a son who was unremitting in his rebellion, a dropout from the beginning to the end of his life in a surfing accident, which may have been suicide...

...I call these war words because they define victims and oppressors and they demand redemptive victories...

...The conflict between the man representing a tired moral civilization and the posturing primitive can only end in a disintegrating mess, and so it does in the climactic scene of the novel when a crippled horse is executed with an axe by a desperate husband, who is struggling to get his dying pregnant wife to the hospital...

...If this is a polemic, it is a good one...

...if it is sociology it is more pertinent than most efforts at explanation...

...Here Stegner's grasp of his theme is masterful, and the degree of abstraction in the characterization of Marian matters little...

...Peck's young disciples, of course, see the high adventure and romance...

...It is the material of tragic experience, and Wallace Stegner's new novel (All the Little Live Things, Viking, 345 pp., $5.75) consciously promotes that dignity...

...This is part of Stegner's intention: to report the tone of older generation defeat...

...In Stegner's book we feel it as a tone of uncertain conviction and deja vu, the oppressive realistic tone of many households of tormented human beings...

...One longs to know with Joe Allston what lies behind Peck's confidence, where he has fear and concern, at what point the orgy will end...

...How does one cut through the flavor of unoriginality in a subject like this, the soaked-in memory of old arguments and complaints in middle-class homes, bound conventionally in their miseries as well as their pleasures...

...Yet Stegner's novel, in its limitations, suggests why the perversities of technique are tempting...

...Or must we really return to living in trees...

...Behind the youth cults of today there is an experimental interest in poverty, pain and death, accompanied perhaps by a confidence that if these things really exist, they exist by some parental mistake or neglect...

...he notes how guarded and watchful Jim Peck is, his eyes glittering behind the matted hair...

...Death is also the mother of conscience and a respect for human pain...

...Stegner infuses this embarrassment of the emotions into the self-deprecating, ironic stance of his narrator...

...These are not just private miseries, and the aging ironist seated on his patio may have to get packing even if he doesn't know where to go...

...Joe Allston is what we would expect, too...

...But this road was blocked, in the complicated series of events, by a combination of Peck's irresponsibility and Allston's hostile suspicion of life...

...In the end it is the matching of a self-conscious, largely insincere passion for life against an equally selfconscious and weary revulsion to it...

...retired professor of literature??exponent of the humanities, the decencies and the old culture...

...Joe Allston rehearses his revulsion as he combats the various garden pests on his land, observes hawks, buzzards and snakes, and in general reminds himself of the bloody slovenliness of nature...

...Peck embodies all the necessary elements ??going unwashed, the beard, lsd, pot, sex, yoga, Zen, riding a motorcycle, preaching fulfillment and freedom to great noise and the writhing of bodies...

...He thinks he lives in a society of bigots, hostiles, fuddy-duddies, and squares who conspire to limit his freedom and his fun...

...The rest of the novel deals with their clash and the others, mostly victims, whom it involves...

...Their lack of conviction cannot lead to negotiation on both sides, but only to the worst kind of surrender, marked by irony and irascibility yet increasingly detached, not too far finally from indifference...

...The truth of the matter seems to be that Peck's energetic attack on the cultural establishment is based upon a profound and well-protected innocence, the innocence inculcated by liberal parents in an affluent society...